Why Noel is no longer laughing
ADISC jockey turned gameshow host is perhaps not the most obvious person to provide a cogent critique of the British banking system. It’s easy to dismiss Noel Edmonds as a publicity-hungry, somewhat eccentric TV personality who is not to be taken too seriously.
But he is also one of a small army of entrepreneurs who say their lives have been ripped apart by the banks that were supposed to be backing them. The description ‘uphill struggle’ does not remotely do justice to the scale of the fight faced by Edmonds, and the less famous businessmen and women who say they have suffered at the hands of the high street lenders.
Theirs are not simple cases, but complex cat’s-cradles, where it is hard to apportion blame definitively.
The entrepreneurs themselves are imperfect human beings and may in some instances have contributed to their misfortunes. Any hint of this will be ruthlessly seized upon by the banks.
They can appear obsessive. Their stories are long and convoluted, so even their allies can eventually lose interest and sympathy. Financially ruined and psychologically battered individuals are up against banks with armies of lawyers and almost bottomless pockets at their disposal.
Without presuming to pass judgment on the merits of his case, Noel Edmonds gives moving testimony of the way he believes his life was wrecked by HBOS. This is a human narrative vividly told – not the stuff of balance sheets and ledgers.
It would be wrong to take sides on his claims about HBOS and Lloyds, which are still going through the system, but his account of the decline in British banking is compelling. As a younger man, he had a relationship with a Bank of Scotland manager who knew him, knew his character and his business ability. Lending was done on the basis of personal relationships and trust.
That has degenerated into an age of cost-cutting, job losses, mechanised call centres and artificial intelligence.
The chief executive of Deutsche Bank this week declared he expects thousands of his bank staff to be replaced by robots. At HSBC – where up to a million small firms have no bank manager but instead have to deal with call centre staff – there has been chaos when thousands had their accounts frozen in a mishandled crackdown on money-laundering.
When will bank chiefs learn that there is no substitute for human insight and relationships? In the end, businesses are all about human stories, not spreadsheets, numbers spewed out of computers and clinical callcentre decisions. They are about the work, the emotion, the energy, the sheer sweat invested in them by their owners. When a business fails, the financial loss is accompanied by other, often more profound ones: of security, of family relationships torn to shreds by stress, of treasured possessions and homes that have to be sold. This is what rogue bankers have to answer for if they are found to have deliberately pillaged their customers’ firms.
Bankers seem to forget that their main purpose is to channel capital to where it is most productive for the economy – in other words to support businesses and help them grow.
The target of Noel Edmonds’ ire is Lloyds, which took over HBOS, but it is not the only bank accused. MPs are this week calling for the release of a report by the City regulator into the treatment of customers put into Royal Bank of Scotland’s global restructuring group.
To some, Noel Edmonds is a figure of fun, but this could not be more serious.
If true, his claims and those of others would be a grotesque betrayal of trust – and without trust, the banking system will implode.
That is the lesson of the financial crisis and one, it seems, that has yet to be fully learned.
When will bank chiefs learn there is no substitute for human insight?