Northern Rock run would not have happened had Government listened to me, says FSA chief Hector Sants Mr Sants suggested that Lloyds - which was bailed out by the UK Government in 2008 - should be given a guarantee that in the event Rock lenders withdrew funding, Lloyds would be able to bridge the gap with loans from the BoE. However, Sir Mervyn King, the BoE Governor, would not provide the money due to the excessive amounts asked for, it is claimed. Next year the BoE is handed extra powers to regulate and supervise banks and large financial institutions. With Mr King stepping down next year, Mr Sants is concerned that whoever accepts the Governor role will have too much power. "We could be concerned that the operational task given to the Governor as an individual, of course that will be a new governor by the time the reforms come into place, is just too great," he said. I'm comfortable with the powers given to the institution, but I would have a greater spread with how those powers are divided up. Talk of banking regulation is high on the agenda following Spain's €100bn bailout for its financial sector at the weekend, with the European Council hoping to approve the first stage of a eurozone banking union at its meeting later this month. Mr Sants has branded the current system whereby UK banking regulations are set by the European Union as "unworkable" if the eurozone pushes ahead with plans for a banking union - featuring a single supervisor of European lenders. He said: "It seems difficult to imagine that the current UK approach can work in the scenario [of a banking union]... We support a single European rulebook... But we supervise locally... Of course that rulebook is created by one country one vote, so if you move to an environment where the majority of the countries were inside the eurozone and so have a different agenda in respect to the rulebook, that would seem to become an unworkable model. [We would be] dependent on a rulebook that effectively we would have lost all control over. At the moment we only have partial control over that rulebook, but potentially we would have lost all control over it. So I think we are at a tipping point whereby the current approach to eurozone regulation for a non-eurozone country could well be unworkable. As the eurozone debt crisis has "gone on a lot longer than people expected," Mr Sants also told the BBC that the UK Government "could have put in a little bit more" when it nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds in 2008. I do think there's an argument that says it would have been easier to restructure... if the banks did not have minority shareholdings in the private sector i.e. if the government controlled them all, and then there was an argument that says they could have restructured them more radically... But the counterbalance is that the private sector is better in managing that process so it's a finely balanced argument. But I tend to the view that we would have been better off with more direct control.