BSA 2012: FPC will affect mortgage availability

Speaking at the Building Societies’ Association conference in Manchester, the former Chancellor said that people would need to keep an eye on the FPC as it was supposed to “lean against the wind”.

Darling said: “This is new and uncharted territory. Nobody else is doing this. This is something we will have to keep a pretty close eye on and it’s why the next governor of the Bank of England will indeed have to have superhuman powers. He or she will be asked to do an awful lot.”

He added that he had some doubts to creating some sort of new “super-regulator” that would deal with monetary policy, prudential regulation and now to have “the power to survey the horizon and anticipate the storms that might be gathering”.

He said: “When you put all of that under one roof, you still have to remember that it is the individual judgements that the regulators reach that matter rather than where the brass plate stands.

“But that’s happened now, it’s political fix if you like, it’s now been in the course of being legislated now.

“It is in my view that we now all do our best together to try and make it work and to concentrate on that and I certainly hope that it does.”

Darling also said during his time as Chancellor he considered whether there was the right balance between the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority.

And he added: "I came to view then that quite simply whatever my view was, that was not the time to re-organise it.”

Last week the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, blamed the timing of the regulatory reshuffle as one of the principal causes as to why the central bank was not able to do all that it could to help curtail the impact of the credit crunch.