Bank of England delays Basel bank capital rules until after summer

The Bank of England will not publish rules for implementing tougher global bank capital requirements until after the summer, it said this week, raising questions about whether a July 2025 start date remains feasible.

The standards were written by the global Basel Committee, and member jurisdictions such as Britain, the United States and the European Union are adapting them for their national rulebooks.

The BoE’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) said last December that it intended to publish the remaining near-final rules in the second quarter of this year.

However, UK regulatory announcements were put on hold for several weeks ahead of the UK general election in early July, with banks expecting an announcement before the summer break to give them a year to prepare for the changes.

The timetable has begun to slip, however.

“We are now in the last stages of completing our work on the Basel 3.1 package and expect to publish near-final rules shortly after the summer break,” a PRA spokesperson said.

The European Union has already said that it won’t roll out a core plank of the rules, covering risks from banks’ securities trading, until January 2026 due to avoid unfair competition due to likely implementation delays in the United States.

US regulators have faced a big backlash from banks on their “Basel Endgame” draft proposals, which complete a suite of tougher international standards rolled out across the world since the 2007-09 global financial crisis forced taxpayers to bail out lenders.

It is unclear when the US will publish final rules, given the Fed has indicated “broad, material” changes can be expected to its proposals.

This could mean the need for a further time-consuming public consultation, making the Fed’s July 2025 start date difficult to meet.