Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said he doesn’t like banks and will scrap interest payments British lenders receive through the Bank of England’s quantitative easing program. 

The Reform Party included the proposal to end the practice of the U.K. central bank paying interest on the reserves placed with it by banks in its 2024 manifesto, which it claimed would bring in up to £40 billion for taxpayers. 

“We are going to do it. Some of the banks won’t like it. Well, I don’t like the banks very much because they debanked me, didn’t they?” Farage said in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

“This will be tough for banks to accept, but I am sorry, the drain on public finances is just too great. It’s not a tax. They are just not going to get free money anymore. They’ll adjust; business always does.”

The BoE currently pays interest on the bank reserves created during the post-global financial crisis quantitative easing (QE) program. That money is now largely held on deposit back at the BoE by commercial banks, which earn a risk-free return linked to the current Bank Rate.

Amid concerns about what a Reform government would mean for policymakers’ independence, Farage declared that he’s “not questioning the independence” of the central bank, but didn’t rule out appointing his own governor. 

“Andrew Bailey is a perfectly polite, nice man, but they should have picked somebody who was a Brexiteer to be in charge of the Bank of England to think totally differently, especially around financial markets, financial market regulation,” he said. 

“If we don’t do things differently, we’re going to get poorer. We’re going to pick different people with a different attitude towards everything.” 

Farage has recently claimed he is giving “serious thought” to scrapping the independent Office for Budget Responsibility if his party wins the next general election.