A ‘group washing machine’ and ‘tangled skein’: the failure of Slater Walker

David Rule

In August 1977, the Bank of England purchased the bank Slater Walker Limited, completing its rescue. The bank had been a subsidiary of Slater Walker Securities, controlled by Jim Slater, which also owned an insurer. This post describes how Slater misused depositors’ and policyholders’ funds to finance his wider business interests. The Bank of England sought to protect depositors by supporting the wider group rather than putting the bank into liquidation. The case remains relevant today when banks and insurers continue to be owned by financial and industrial groups, including private equity sponsors, and supervisors must consider how to address conflicts of interest and how far to insulate the bank or insurer from the rest of the group.

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A balancing act in public ownership: the quiet legacy of the Bank of England Act 1946

Andrew Hewitt

Sunday 1 March 2026 was the 80th anniversary of the Bank’s coming into public ownership, following the Bank of England Act 1946. It was the first of eight major nationalisations by the post-war Labour government and the only one not to be later reversed, in whole or in part. Some opponents, at the time, were said to consider it a revolutionary ‘measure of first-class importance’; others considered it inconsequential. Although it was a defining point in UK financial history, it did not feature highly in the public consciousness. Yet it laid enduring foundations for the Bank’s operational and financial independence, carefully balancing powers to act in the public interest with limits on political interference.

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Open letters: Laying bare linguistic patterns in PRA messages using machine learning

David Bholat and James Brookes

In a recent research paper, we show that the way supervisors write to banks and building societies (hereafter ‘banks’) has changed since the financial crisis. Supervisors now adopt a more directive, forward-looking, complex and formal style than they did before the financial crisis. We also show that their language and linguistic style is related to the nature of the bank. For instance, banks that are closest to failure get letters that have a lot of risk-related language in them. In this blog, we discuss the linguistic features that most sharply distinguish different types of letters, and the machine learning algorithm we used to arrive at our conclusions.

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