LONDON: Britain needs to create a new body to enhance an optimistic “vision” for banking and slash taxes on the sector after failing to assist the sector adequately ahead of Brexit, banking trade body UK Finance’s chair stated on Wednesday.

Britain is due to leave the European Union on October 31 but so far has not guaranteed an exit deal.

To avoid disruption, London-based banking institutions have moved some staff and actions to new hubs in the European Union to maintain customer links, raising questions about the capital’s long term clout in global finance.

The authorities reduced its assistance for the finance industry’s plan for mutual recognition post-Brexit to focus instead on a more generous form of future market access to the EU than usually given to non-EU countries.

“I do not think it’s unfair to say that since the financial crisis and particularly during the Brexit negotiations, our sector and services generally have seen nothing like the level of strategic support and attention from authorities which has been granted to goods and to technology ,” Bob Wigley told the UK Finance’s summer reception .

Wigley stated the government should make a new, formal body made up of regulators, government officials and the Bank of England governor to begin a positive national vision for the role of the finance industry.

The aggregate rate of levy paid by banks in New York and Frankfurt is much below in London, he stated.

“This cannot be sustainable post Brexit without an even larger outflux of international banks than Brexit itself may deliver,” Wigley claimed.

UK Finance members like RBS and Lloyds had to be bailed out by taxpayers during the financial crisis that ushered in years of belt-tightening for millions of Britons.

As a consequence, the industry is considered still too unpopular for politicians to be seen supporting it even though finance is Britain’s largest economic sector, generating an annual trade surplus of about 70 billion pounds.