§ Mr. Crawfordasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will make a statement on the exclusion of the three Scottish clearing banks from the list of banks, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland and NatWest, chosen as the recipients of applications from Scottish applicants in the recent sale of BP stock.
Mr. Joel Bamett,pursuant to his reply [Official Report, 4th July 1977; Vol. 934, c. 402], gave the following information:
The Bank of England advised that the number of receiving banks should be kept at the lowest number consistent with ensuring adequate capacity to handle the expected number of application forms, in order to minimise the costs and the problems of co-ordinating over the allocation of stock. These criteria were best 505W met by choosing the four London clearing banks in addition to the Bank of England. The Scottish clearing banks, however, formed part of the distribution system for application forms.