UK lenders accuse Bank of England of flawed capital comparison

Britain’s largest banks have a bone to pick with the Bank of England, and it is not a small one. Major lenders including Barclays, HSBC, and Lloyds are pushing back hard against a Bank of England analysis they say fundamentally misrepresents how UK capital requirements stack up against those faced by their American competitors. What the Bank of England actually said The BoE’s Financial Policy Committee published its December 2025 capital review, cutting the benchmark for Tier 1 capital from 14% to around 13% of risk-weighted assets. That is the first reduction in a decade, walking back a threshold that had been in place since 2015. The BoE’s review also included cross-jurisdictional comparisons designed to show where UK requirements sit relative to other major banking systems, particularly the United States. The central bank’s position is that simple cross-border comparisons are misleading without adjustments, and that once you make those adjustments, UK requirements do not look dramatically out of line with US rules. UK banks read that conclusion differently. Their argument is that the BoE’s adjusted figures actually understate how stringent UK requirements are relative to the US,...