Infected Blood Compensation Scheme (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and all the speakers in this debate thus far. I continue where she left off, taking a moment to look at the big picture.

We have a huge problem with trust in politics and government in our society at the moment. Sometimes, attached to that is the idea that, in the past, there was some golden age when everything worked. This tragedy, this awful behaviour by the state, is a demonstration that that is not the case. We have huge problems of dysfunction in the way our state has worked over long periods of time. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, addressing this fairly and justly, with compassion and care, could start to repair the relationship between the state and people.

I note the powerful speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who, like all the speakers before her, has been very much a leader in this area. I come along modestly and add the Green Party’s support when I can. I thank the Minister for addressing the start of this debate with appropriate seriousness and recognising the sacrifice of families, campaigners and those who have been affected, who have demonstrated that campaigning works, in that we at least have a compensation scheme. But their experience also demonstrates that you cannot say, “We’ve won our fight, now we can get on with our lives”. People have to keep fighting and fighting and fighting. That is an unreasonable burden to put on people who have already fought for so much.

I want to pick up a couple of specific points, starting with the important contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Patten. It is considered bad form in your Lordships’ House to repeat, but I am going to repeat his demand: the Government surely have to be able to find figures to show how many people have died waiting for compensation. The figures are awful—around 3,000 people have been compensated out of 19,000 applications. We know that there must have been a lot of deaths. It cannot be beyond the capacity of the Government to give us that figure and demonstrate to the public that everyone can see clearly what is happening. This is about basic transparency.

There are many points to be made about what is wrong with what is happening now, and many of them have already been made. I pick two issues that the public would be astonished by if they were widely known. One is the fact that compensation payments are being eroded by inflation. The longer the state drags its feet, the less effective the money that people are getting to be able to get on with their lives. That is inappropriate and clearly wrong. The other point is that victims who have died must be treated in the same way as living victims. Bereaved families see the money immediately reduced as soon as someone dies, but they have died because of the terrible actions of the state. That cannot be considered in any way acceptable.

It is easy to get angry about this—your Lordships already have and will continue to do so. We have a new Government and a chance for a new start. Let us hope that this Government approach this with compassion, care and a realistic understanding that we have to restore trust in the state and in government. Indeed, in this current age of shocks, with so many health and other threats approaching, we need to ensure that there is trust in the medical profession. This compensation scheme can go some way to restoring that.

Financial Services and Markets Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th July 2026 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

172C: After Clause 47, insert the following new Clause—
“Review of the City of London Corporation(1) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, appoint an independent person or panel to undertake a review of the functions of the City of London Corporation in relation to regulation of financial services and markets.(2) The review must consider—(a) the arrangements relating to engagement between the City of London Corporation and the FCA and PRA, and(b) the extent to which the City of London Corporation contributes to the regulation of financial services and markets.(3) The reviewer must publish a report setting out their findings and recommendations no later than 18 months after appointment.(4) The Secretary of State must lay the report before Parliament and, within six months of receiving it, publish a response setting out what steps the Government intends to take in response to the recommendations.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, this amendment would provide for a review of the City of London Corporation with regard to the regulation of financial services and markets. At Second Reading, I referenced my intention to address this issue—here it is.

In the interests of transparency, I note that my interest in the City of London Corporation extends beyond that. Noble Lords who read the Politico email newsletter may have noted that it has reported that I am working with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services on a survey of people’s views of the City of London Corporation, including whether it should be retained as it is, reformed or abolished. That extends beyond the regulation of financial services and markets as covered by the Bill.

I also note that the survey’s existence has led to me being contacted by a significant number of both city residents who are unhappy with the way in which the corporation fulfils its local government-type functions and organisations that receive funding from it and are concerned about the way in which things are done. Those organisations are most keen that what I say does not identify them in any way, for fear of reprisals—I suggest that that is disturbing and telling in itself—but significant elements of the corporation’s operation not being covered by the freedom of information legislation makes it difficult to uncover exactly what is going on.

The survey and my expression of my personal views on the subject have sometimes been confused, as in a letter sent on 1 July by the corporation’s policy chairman, town clerk and chief executive to members of the APPG, including me. The letter seemed to be unable to distinguish between the questions in the survey and comments that I have personally made about the corporation. As the letter from the corporation notes, my views on its existence are well known. Indeed, when I was elected as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales in 2012, the city diary in the Evening Standard noted my calls for its abolition; that was the only record of the election result in that newspaper.

However, the letter of 1 July from the corporation contains powerful arguments for my amendment, which calls for an independent person or panel to be appointed by the Secretary of State to undertake a review of the functions of the City of London Corporation in relation to regulation of financial services and markets. The letter refers to the corporation’s place

“in the delivery of strategic, financial and professional services initiatives”.

It says:

“Mayors have helped to catalyse major initiatives such as the Mansion House Compact and Accord”.


As one industry commentator has noted, in seeking to channel pension fund capital into growth assets,

“private equity, infrastructure, private credit and venture capital are now firmly on the radar”

of pension funds. These are all sectors where we know that benefits are more likely to flow into the financial sector than to investors.

The corporation’s letter also points to its role in the Office for Investment: Financial Services, which describes itself on its website as providing

“international fintech firms with a single front door for regulatory assistance and wider business support”.

I direct noble Lords who want to explore the issues around this so-called foreign direct investment further to an excellent book by Angus Hanton, Vassal State: How America Runs Britain. It quotes a late Member of your Lordships’ House, Lord Myners, who said in 2021:

“Britain is open for business in the same way that a car boot sale is open for business”.


It is now even more open for business, with the Financial Times recently reporting that the value of acquisition by foreign buyers is now up to £128 billion this year—more than triple the level in the same period in 2025, and that was before the apparently pending sale of easyJet to yet another US private equity firm. That the last rotten borough in the country—finally otherwise removed by the Reform Act 1867, with non-residential votes removed from other council areas in 1969—operating under rules that would be unacceptable anywhere else in public life and that shield it from scrutiny, skewing democratic representation in favour of business, overwhelmingly financial businesses, can exercise privileged influence over our laws and their administration over regulation is surely something that should be examined, particularly over financial laws that, as we discovered in 2007-08, are so essential to our security.

That is all that this amendment asks for: to conduct an independent review of the corporation’s impact on financial regulations and markets. Surely, if the corporation is so confident about the claimed positive impacts that it likes to trumpet, it and the Government could have no objection to a review. Given the problem we have with trust in our politics and financial system, more transparency and consideration would surely be a good thing. I note a recent Public First survey that found that 40% of people think that financial markets have too much influence over decisions made by elected Governments. I also note—the Minister might like to consider this—that the same survey found that 52% agreed that the UK should prioritise financial stability and consumer protections, even if this limits investment and economic growth. When asked about the potential changes to the UK’s post-2008 bank ring-fencing regime, 64% agreed that financial stability should be the priority.

Questioning the City’s place is not, after all, new. The Royal Commission on the Amalgamation of the City and County of London recommended its abolition in 1894. It was Labour Party policy to abolish today’s City of London Corporation until Tony Blair took over the party, and he instead chose to give even greater weighting to the business votes against those of residents.

Defenders of the City of London Corporation tend to reach for the language of heritage, as does the letter of 1 July: the corporation is ancient. It is part of the fabric of London’s history. Reform would be complicated. These are not effective arguments against examination. Age alone does not confer legitimacy—just look at the UK constitution. The corporation’s structures were not designed for a modern democracy. They pre-date it and have been carefully preserved by those who benefit from them.

The corporation is not the financial sector, but it is its lobbyist, its defender and a power base enjoyed by no other part of our society. Its existence cannot be separated from the fact that the financial industry is in a privileged position in our society. Giant financial corporations do not need any further boost to their power; they have more than enough already. No other major financial centre has anything resembling the City of London Corporation—not New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt or Singapore. Surely we should be examining the impact of this singular entity on the state of the UK. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bi (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee of my interest as the chair of Norton Rose Fulbright. Although my firm was located in the City of London for more than 200 years, from its founding in 1794, we are no longer within the jurisdiction of the corporation, having ventured south of the river a few years ago. My current office at More London gives me what is probably the best view of the Tower of London, which, notwithstanding the imminent arrival of the Bayeux tapestry, has been a daily reminder that not even the conqueror had the poor sense to interfere with the freedoms of the City, which worked extremely well, and we should be careful before we consider doing so. I oppose this amendment, which contemplates a two and a half year process after Royal Assent, with the attendant costs and distraction for the Treasury that such a review would entail. We should therefore ask what the review is actually meant to uncover.

--- Later in debate ---

Taken together, I do not see the need for action, as the corporation does not have a unique or privileged position in the development of financial services regulation, at which the Bill is particularly targeted. As such, I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response and everyone who has taken part in this interesting and informative debate. We have engaged with some interesting and broad issues. I particularly commend the noble Lord, Lord Pitt-Watson, who gave us some interesting suggestions and proposals that I am certainly going to go away and think about. I do not think that continuing with the history is necessarily the right thing to do, but that does not mean we cannot learn from history. The idea of the City of London having responsibility for its tradespeople has an interesting comparison, which makes me wonder: had we held the City responsible for the financial crash of 2007-08, and if the City had paid some of the large expenses that were instead, by austerity, put on the shoulders of the poor, the disabled and the young around the country, how different things might have been.

I note that the noble Lord also said that the City should be responsible for seeing that these services should deliver benefit to the world. That is an interesting proposal that I will take away. In responding to what the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, said, questioning what influence the City has over the FCA and the PRA, I will refer to the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Bi—

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness was not here at the start of this sitting, which started earlier this afternoon, almost five hours ago. I point out that, as far as the Companion is concerned, when noble Lords are withdrawing amendments, they must be short and not rehash the whole argument or make responses to all the points made during the debate. If the noble Baroness would move towards withdrawing the amendment, that would be good.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord, the Whip. I am not rehashing; I am engaging with the contributions.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

No. Paragraph 8.82 of the Companion says that when withdrawing amendments, noble Lords should be short in doing so and should not engage, because they will have done that during the debate.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I was speaking for about a minute and a half before the noble Lord interrupted me. I think three minutes might count as short, and I have two short points to make. The first, as I was saying before I was interrupted, is that the noble Baroness, Lady Bi, said that the City—

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness, but I support what was said from the Government Front Bench. This matter was discussed again in our Procedure Committee this morning: arguments that have been put are understood by a committee or by the House, and there is often merit in moving on relatively quickly, so, from the Opposition Front Bench, I support what was said.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I note the noble Lord’s contribution. As I said, I would have finished by now had I not been interrupted multiple times. The simple point I want to make is that the noble Baroness, Lady Bi, said that the City engages constructively with regulators. She also said that it uses its convening power to promote the sector. I would argue that, put together, those two things make the case for this amendment.

However, I was going to be brief; I would otherwise have finished a minute ago. We have had an interesting discussion. I will think about where this might go on Report but, in the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 172C withdrawn.

Nature’s Rights Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Friday 3rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin by quoting the Government’s own words from a biodiversity strategy published jointly with the devolved Governments in February 2025:

“Biodiversity is key to all the processes that support life on Earth. We rely on it for our essential needs, like food, shelter, energy and medicine, as well as for the ecosystem services it provides, such as climate regulation, flood management, water purification, disease and pest control, and pollination. Additionally, more than half of the world’s gross domestic product … is highly or moderately dependent on nature”.


You would therefore think that the Government, and Governments around the world, would have established legal systems and forms to effectively protect and enhance nature, but that is not what is happening—particularly in the UK, one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth, as the State of Nature report of 2023 concluded. That report was arguably very soon after the 2021 Environment Act, which set the very modest target of halting the decline in species abundance by 2030.

But half a decade after the Act, there are still scant signs of progress. For evidence, I go to a peer-reviewed study by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, out this year, which found little sign of an end to the spiralling decline. Its lead author pointed to the grave risk of loss of the merlin, the mountain ringlet, large heath butterflies and plants such as burnt orchid, grass-of-parnassus and alpine gentian, and many other species. The lead author said:

“This will negatively affect local habitats and a range of ecological functions, from soil health and nutrient cycling to pollination and food production, with knock-on effects for wildlife and people”.


That reflects what is happening around the world. The UN Environment Programme found in 2019 that 150 countries have enshrined environmental protection or the right to a healthy environment in their constitutions, 176 countries have environmental framework laws and 164 countries have created cabinet-level bodies for environmental protection.

However, the laws for environmental protection have not worked. That is not surprising, for as Mari Margil from the US Centre for Democratic and Environmental Rights explains,

“environmental laws are put in place to determine how much we can harm or exploit nature”.

Environmental laws and regulations have not fundamentally changed the rate of environmental destruction, despite 60 years or more of awareness of environmental issues and half a century of environmental law. Short-term economic interests, particularly of powerful companies—now with resources and power rivalling those of all but the largest states—and nations’ determination to exploit and extract from states unable or unwilling to resist them, through mining, logging and polluting, have overwhelmed what are essentially ineffective legal provisions.

That has potentially existential consequences for humans and for our nation. The long-delayed and still not fully released joint intelligence chiefs’ report that finally emerged in January identified six ecosystem regions that it called

“critical for UK national security”

and which it said were, on a reasonable worst-case scenario, on the “pathway to collapse”.

The search has therefore begun for an alternative approach to secure the future of our biosphere and all our futures. The approach that many have settled on, and which the Bill brings in, is that of rights to nature.

I thank the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology for setting out a clear briefing about the ethical framework of rights to nature. It notes that there are “competing views” on this, and I expect we will hear some of those today, but it is worth going back through the origins of this issue.

The origins of this alternative approach are often traced back to Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing?, published in 1972, who noted that, for many centuries, women and slaves were not fully recognised as legal subjects, and described how there had been a progressive widening of the law’s circle of concern. Stone proposed that

“we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole”—

which is what the Bill does.

The “rights to nature” approach offers a reset in our relationship and the ending of the disastrous 17th-century paradigm: a mechanistic worldview that falsely separates people, nature and the economy as though they can operate independently. Global application of that paradigm has led to this disaster, as the Stockholm Resilience Centre charts—literally, in the case of one diagram showing the current state of human impacts on nine planetary boundaries; seven of them have not just been exceeded but smashed. As the European Economic and Social Committee spokesman said:

“It’s irrational to have societal systems that undermine Nature”.


As one of the many who have mustered on Instagram to support the Bill put it beautifully, we need a green Magna Carta—and that is what the Bill I present before your Lordships today is.

The Bill was written by lawyer Mumta Ito of the Nature’s Rights charity, drawing on experience working with the UN Harmony With Nature programme—for more of its foundations your Lordships can go to a study conducted for the European Economic and Social Committee, Towards an EU Fundamental Charter for the Rights of Nature. What I present here today is a new legal framework that recognises nature’s rights as the foundation of human rights and social and economic activity. It aligns law with modern scientific understanding.

This is a long Bill, particularly for a Private Member’s Bill, at 57 pages, and it not only sets down a major change in legal principle but would: establish a legal duty of care for public bodies, business and individuals; establish an integrated rights framework; introduce mechanisms for dispute resolution and legal enforcement; establish a nature guardianship council, bioregional councils and a nature’s rights tribunal; and create a governance structure for implementation and integration. As usual, our excellent Library briefing sets out the impact of the Bill clause by clause, and the Bill itself is written in clear and accessible language, with a particular focus on ensuring that democracy and local democratic voices are at the heart of decision-making across its proposals. If we are going to “Change Everything”—yes, I have a book out with that title—we have to set out a plan, as well as a paradigm shift.

However, in this introductory speech I will concentrate chiefly on the major change in legal principle and approach—nature’s rights—because making the case is the first step to delivering it. I will focus on making the case for rights of nature as the foundation of a healthy society—and for all our futures—to genuinely, at scale, not just protect the fragments of poisoned, degraded, limited nature that we have left but regenerate it.

To do that, I will briefly outline the international picture. For, while the Bill is, I believe, the most comprehensive to be considered by any global legislature, the concept of rights of nature, and its application, has been spreading like a rich and diverse mycorrhizal fungal network, nourishing a flourishing tree of legal change.

To quote the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics, published in 2021, rights of nature has gone from being a radical idea espoused by only a handful of marginalised actors to a legal strategy seriously considered in a wide variety of domestic and international policy areas. Its authors count 185 legal provisions recognising rights of nature in 17 countries across five continents, with 50 more pending in 2021 across a dozen other countries. Rights of nature are also now recognised in many international policy documents.

Two exemplars are to be found in New Zealand—centred on the Whanganui River, a famous example—and Ecuador. Both cases are inspired, as is the whole nature’s rights movement, by indigenous thinking: the foundations of cultures that have existed for many thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of years, which have allowed human societies to live and flourish without trashing their local environments or the planet. Perhaps the most globally comprehensive is Article 71 of the Ecuadorian constitution, written in 2008:

“Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes”.


It is important to say that the Bill does not represent an alternative to very strong local action, such as by the Friends of the Thames and the Western Sussex Rivers Trust, working on rights of rivers, and declarations of the rights of rivers—on which the House of Commons Library recently wrote an excellent report—but, rather, it is complementary to those efforts. Defending the rights of one river can have only a limited impact on the microplastic and nano plastic pollution that now covers the planet, the explosion of novel entity pollution that has far exceeded the planet’s limits, and of course the climate emergency, with every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted having global impacts and every tonne prevented being emitted being a global positive. All that demands far broader action than just a focus on one river, as important as that is.

It is also entirely complementary with the campaign, of which I declare I am a member, to create an international offence of ecocide, and calls—on which I am also working—to strengthen the rights of Antarctica to continue to exist as a healthy part of the cryosphere. It also fits very well with the One Health approach that acknowledges that human, animal and environmental health are all interdependent.

I very much look forward to our debate today, and I thank the wide range of Peers who have signed up to participate. I particularly look forward to the Minister’s response, for the world is watching—I can say that from the social media interest that this debate has already generated.

The UK Government currently have no stance on the rights of nature on the formal record that the House of Lords Library could find. Two years ago, at the United Nations, the Tory Government caused international upset at the United Nations by vehemently opposing a Motion from Bolivia on

“living well in balance and harmony with Mother Earth and Mother Earth-centric actions”.

That included a passage on the rights of nature.

However, we now have a Labour Government, and I trust that we will hear for the first time whether they have moved on from that disastrous anthropocentric perspective of 2024. Labour’s 2024 manifesto acknowledged that we are in a “nature emergency” and said it would tackle

“the unforgivable pollution of our rivers and seas … promote biodiversity, and protect our landscapes and wildlife”.

In the nature’s rights debate, the Government have a chance to acknowledge demands acknowledging a place for nature, not as a source for extraction but as a place for the human and the more than human to flourish.

To conclude, any noble Lords participating today might like to check out Instagram, to see a positive use of social media offering broad support for the Bill from around the UK and beyond. I will finish with the words of one of those posts, from 12 year-old artist and naturalist Benjamin Fallow, who made a video supporting the Bill. He said:

“Listen to the children … we need nature and wildlife to survive”.


I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I echo that. I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate. It has been a fine debate, and I thank everyone who has contributed.

Picking up the Minister’s comments to start with, I am taking encouragement from a part near the end where she said that the Government might be open in principle to considering the rights of nature in an international context. I will have to study the fine detail of her comments, but I am taking that as a positive step forward. I also acknowledge that she recognises the legitimacy of concerns about the state of nature, which are widespread.

Picking up what the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said about this being a transformative, even revolutionary Bill—step forward, rights of nature—I agree. The Minister talked about changing the UK’s constitutional and legal framework. Of course, that is a broader question we have before us today. We are going to have to see major changes to them to create a modern, functional, democratic constitution, and the rights of nature could be part of that transformation. The Minister also talked about a fundamental reworking of principles. As some of the early proponents of the rights of nature said, that is also what happened when we created rights for enslaved people and women. We have seen significant changes in the past.

I thank, in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for her strong support for the Bill. She summed up in one question why we need this Bill: is the status quo delivering for the protection of nature and the rights of future generations? No, the current framework is not. She also said that the rights of nature are not in competition with human rights or economic prosperity and explained, as did the Minister, how this fits within the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. As the Minister acknowledged, this Bill acknowledges the competencies of the devolved Administrations. That has been carefully written into the Bill.

I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, who said we have looked at how we derive benefit from nature rather than seeing that we owe it a duty of care. I wish her Bill all fair winds behind it and thank her for starting my morning, as we had a pre-debate discussion, with a lovely picture of a leveret. That really cheered up my morning. I can recommend that any morning you need to be cheered up.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for stressing the need for urgency and action. I am going to look up the work of his grandfather. I will be very interested to find out about that. I also thank him for his focus on the need to support indigenous communities. I have recently come back from the High North. Indigenous communities in the High North and Europe have a lot to teach us but are also under significant threat and need protection.

I thank the noble Baroness beside me for highlighting the work of Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? It is a great book and anyone who has not read it should.

I engage now with the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. I sincerely thank them for seriously engaging with this debate and this Bill. I appreciate that. I am a little surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, regarded as an argument against it that it would be a complete upending of our current arrangements. Coming from one of the chief proponents of Brexit, it seems a little curious that that would be an argument against the Bill—but I will park that there. However, I also note that the noble Lord said we should have more philosophical debates in our Chamber, and I agree. We have philosophies that have led us to a very bad place in the world at this moment. Debating philosophies and thinking about the foundations of our thought is something we need to do a great deal more of.

One of the points the noble Lord, Lord Frost, made was that there is a problem in how you balance various types of nature, organisms and ecosystems. A number of other noble Lords also said this. The noble Lord described this as an “incommensurable variable”. We have had about 4 billion years of life on this planet. It has always been a balance. It has very often been co-operation between organisms, co-operation between species, working out. That is what we would have to continue with as part of that nature.

The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, asked about the definition of “Nature”. I point her to Clause 42; page 37 sets out that definition on the basis of the Bill. I really appreciate her careful engagement and her questions about negative and affirmative procedures, which I will very much look at.

The noble Baroness asked how this might work with the EU reset. I point out that a parallel effort is happening within the EU at this moment. The Rights for Nature: Empower Citizens to Represent and Protect Ecosystems initiative has been accepted under the European citizens’ initiative regulation and is being taken forward within Europe. Of course, should we return to being part of Europe, in the future, it would not be a problem at all any more.

I will pick up just a couple of the points from the noble Earl, Lord Effingham. I am aware of time. He said that national security is

“the first duty of any government”.

I point to the Joint Intelligence Committee’s report highlighting how biodiversity is essential to our security and how food security is a pressing problem because of those risks. These are not two things to set against each other.

The noble Earl seemed to find problems with a legal duty of care for companies and organisations with overseas activities. Again, I cross-reference the JIC report: those overseas activities are not faraway things with no impact on us; they have very close impacts on our “everyday economic realities”, in the noble Earl’s words.

The noble Lord, Lord Winston, said that this might give too much power to lawyers. Noble Lords will see that there is so much detail in the Bill because of its stress on democracy, particularly local democracy—to pick up the points of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. That is where the power lies, rather than with the lawyers.

The noble Lord raised a fairly obvious point about bacteria. That is where we have to acknowledge that we are holobionts; we consist of some 50,000 species. We tend to think of bacteria as being that thing out there that we want to kill, but protecting the bacteria of our own microbiome is a crucial step to protecting our own health.

Finally, I will pick up the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and wish the Friends of the Dart and all other similar groups around these islands the absolute best. The noble Baroness said that we need to address the failure of enforcement and regulation. Yes, we do, but we have been trying to do that for decades under our current model and it is not working.

The noble Baroness pointed to the limitations in the way that rights of nature have been working for Ecuador. I am not going to claim that any single Bill or action is a silver bullet to fix all our problems. If anyone tells you, “I have this one thing that is going to fix everything”, I would immediately tell you to disregard it. This is an essential foundation for our future. It does not solve all our problems or deliver everything that we need; it is a foundation to build on that acknowledges that our life is dependent on all other life. The noble Baroness mentioned agro-ecological farming and a new way of thinking and working. That is what we need: a new way of thinking and working. I commend the Bill to the House.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this debate—there could hardly be a more important one. It might surprise noble Lords to hear me say that. In this unprecedented heatwave, with the people and infrastructure of these islands melting around us, noble Lords might expect me to say that we should talk about the climate emergency and particularly climate adaptation. I often do just that, especially having just come off the number 390 bus. I am speaking about political resilience today precisely because it is a crucial part of climate adaptation.

Whatever the specifications of our rail lines, the designs of our school buildings or the nature of our food system, the single most important thing for the coming difficult decades—this age of shocks, in which climate is just one of the seven planetary boundaries we have burst through, to which geopolitical and health shocks, for starters, can be added to the tally of threats—is the resilience of our politics. That includes the trust and empowerment of individuals and organisations to make decisions under life and death pressures as well as during the daily grind. The ability to prioritise and make the right survival choices is crucial. That means a functional politics, starting from the smallest village and progressing up to the giant, fragile city of London and the national scale. That means a functioning democracy, in which everyone can contribute, have a say and share their knowledge, skills and energy.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, gave us a starter list of subjects for today on the growing threats to democratic institutions. The first was disinformation. We have already heard—and no doubt will hear a lot more—about social media and the terrible lies and slurs to be found on it. That is all true, of course, and the people who profit from it—the handful of Silicon Valley billionaires and their friends, with whom our Government are all too often cosying up, inviting them in closer with lucrative contracts, giving them effective control over vital public infrastructure—present a problem of political trust. But that disinformation is widely spread across traditional legacy media as well. This week I heard a noble Lord suggest that we should put “mainstream newspapers” into schools to inform the pupils. Well, no thanks: we do not want the racism, sexism, transphobia and other prejudices found in many of them—directed by the handful of right-wing media tycoons who own them—to be fed to our pupils, at least not without far better critical thinking and media literacy education than we have now.

Another subject is foreign interference. We get the politics that the few pay for—and it is no wonder the people do not trust that, wherever on the planet the money comes from. There is no doubt that we are in a grey-zone information conflict with states that have one interest: destabilising us. Those tech bros are again providing convenient tools for that form of warfare and profiting from it. But we are creating fertile conditions for those seeds to sprout and grow. After all, we read the reliably reported news today that the current Chancellor is asking big business and its representatives to lobby the person presumed to be our future Prime Minister to keep her job.

The final subject on the list of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is declining trust in politics, which is what I want to mostly focus on. I do not think I have yet mentioned in the Chamber that a have a new book out, titled Green Thinking. Its subtitle begins with a word that needs to be inserted into all our dialogues and thought: unlearning. It is the systems of thought and approaches to life, from anthropocentrism to reductionism and neocolonialism to growthism—the ideology of a cancer cell—that got us into this state, and we need very different thinking to get out of it.

One thought pattern—and I will not single anyone out, but we have heard a great deal of it today—is that we were on the right path around the 1990s and we have strayed from it, and that we had democratic institutions and, somehow, lost them. The suggestion is that we need to get back on the path. That is a profound fault in thinking. Thia overheated, globally unstable and unhealthy planet is the product of the 20th century, the result of 40 years of extractivism, toxic growth obsession and trickle-down theories of well-being. The profound mistrust is the result of our political institutions and structures.

Francis Fukuyama was only reflecting the general thought pattern of the 1990s in saying that we had reached the end of history and the peak of human achievement in our political and economic systems—what we were always meant to get to. That thesis looks pretty silly now, but at the core of it was liberal democracy and the electoral politics of majoritarianism—the people of these islands and the world being told that they had only one role in politics: to decide who ran the system, to turn up and vote between two choices occasionally. They were not to even think about having the agency, the power or the right to change the system to make different economic and social choices collectively in their communities.

So, what to do? I look around the Chamber and I see many noble Lords who were not here at the start of the Covid pandemic. As the Covid inquiry has shown, there were huge failures of leadership then and a deadly lack of seriousness in our Government. There was also a demonstration that in an emergency there are existing tools for the Government to act fast. We are, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, in a democratic emergency, so we need to tackle the threat to the political systems by making them far more democratic.

I have heard people say that we cannot change the voting system or the constitutional arrangements now—that we have to wait years for an election for a mandate from voters. There is no alternative, they say. Oh, yes there is. We hear from the man who we assume will be the next Prime Minister about the plans to devolve power out to the regions. That would be great, but what we most need to do—the single key step in this democratic emergency—is to ensure that in the next election the people’s voice and views are represented in Parliament and that we have a fair, proportional voting system. As the brilliant organisation Make Votes Matter says, make votes match seats.

In the May council elections in Birmingham, a first past the post election, a Green was elected with 20.5% of the vote. Of course, I am glad the Green won, but I feel for the other people in that ward. Let us fast-forward to the next general election and imagine similar results up and down the country. Democracy would be a good idea, and having a genuine democracy would create a far more resilient society for this very difficult age.

Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his expansive introduction to this SI. I wish to express concern about two elements of it: the change in the transactions and the change in the rules on trusts.

This all comes at a moment when the OECD and the Financial Action Task Force are pushing every major jurisdiction in the direction of having more transparency, more openness and more recording. It weakens the UK’s stance when we ask other countries to tighten their own procedures. Both the OECD and the FATF have been pushing countries to make registers of beneficial ownership more complete and more accessible. The message that is being sent is, “We need to widen the net”.

Of course, historically, the UK has held itself up as a leader in this area, however hard it might have been to justify that claim. One of my questions for the Minister is: how does this measure align with the Government’s 2025 anti-corruption strategy, which is supposedly aimed at driving dirty money out of the UK and strengthening national security?

I note that, in December, the City of London Police was awarded an extra £15 million to expand its anti-corruption efforts. The Justice Secretary then said that the UK

“will no longer be a haven for dirty money and dictators’ laundered assets”

and promised action to tackle “professional enablers”— the lawyers, bankers and estate agents who we know have been at the heart of some very murky, shall we say, transactions. As the Justice Secretary said at the time, all too often, the trail of dirty money “leads back” to London; he also noted that that is

“exploited by those Kremlin-linked elites who enable Putin’s aggression”.

I come to my two specific points. The greatest area of concern that I can identify—the Minister alluded to this—is the jurisdictions under enhanced monitoring. The SI replaces high-risk third countries with FATF “call for action” countries in the enhanced due diligence trigger. Therefore, we are picking up only countries that are blacklisted now: North Korea, Iran and Myanmar. Previously, the regulations that applied to so-called grey list countries, which called for increased monitoring, included the UAE, South Africa, Turkey, Nigeria and the Philippines.

UK firms transacting with counterparts in those jurisdictions will no longer be automatically required to imply the enhanced due diligence. This seems to place a great deal of trust in UK companies that do not have a great record; I cross-reference back to what the Justice Secretary said in December about dirty money flowing into London. So, in effect, this SI represents a substantial retreat at exactly the moment when we are supposed to be cracking down on illicit finance.

My second area of detailed concern is the register provisions. New paragraph 23A of Schedule 3A to the 2017 regulations will create the first-ever general sized-based exemption from the trust register. If a trust holds no UK land, has under £2,000 in current assets, has never held more than £10,000 over its lifetime and earns under £5,000 a year, it never has to register.

This anti-abuse rule stops only a single settler, but does not allow for the situation where a wealthy family spreads a pot across a spouse, parents, adult children and who knows who else with each acting as a settler. Regulation 25(3) removes stamp duty reserve tax as a registration trigger, quietly pulling share-owning trusts that would otherwise have appeared on the register out of the scope of the register.

For those who might be listening, stamp duty reserve tax is a 0.5% tax when you buy UK shares electronically, so if a trust buys £100,000 worth of UK shares, it pays £500 in SDRT. It is a tiny tax and a tiny tax liability, but at the moment that triggers the registration. There are express trusts that have to register because of what they are, but there are also a large number of trusts that have to register only because of this provision. Trusts that own UK-listed shares are exactly the kind of structure where transparency matters to cleaning up the dirty money and I think to the general public as well. They are how anonymous foreign money often holds stocks in UK companies. The current position means that any trust active in the UK equity market at any scale has been caught, regardless of where it is based or who set it up, so removing it punches a hole in the net specifically to oversee shareholding trusts. I would like to hear some more from the Minister on how the Government see this deregulation as being any kind of positive when we are trying to crack down on the flows of dirty money that the Government acknowledge are flooding into London.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, these regulations introduce a number of changes following the Government’s 2022 review and the 2024 consultation. I thank the Minister for his clear introduction and for emphasising the important principle of getting things right first time, which partly explains why these reforms have taken time to come in. Some of the changes appear to be sensible. Refining due diligence requirements so that enhanced due diligence applies to unusually complex transactions rather than all complex transactions seems a proportionate step. Likewise, reforming the trust registration service to close identified gaps, while creating an exemption for low-value, low-risk trusts, appears to strike a reasonable balance between maintaining safeguards and reducing unnecessary burdens. To that extent, His Majesty’s Opposition welcome the direction of travel.

However, these regulations also raise a wider and very important question about whether the current anti-money laundering regime is operating as effectively, proportionately and fairly as it should. It is right—indeed, it is essential—that we are robust in tackling money laundering, terrorist finance and financial crime, but it is also essential that the system does not impose excessive costs, drive firms into defensive behaviour or leave innocent customers and legitimate businesses without access to banking services.

The purpose of anti-money laundering regulation is, of course, to prevent crime, but there is growing evidence that the regime can also have a serious unintended consequence, and customers who have done nothing wrong are nevertheless finding themselves excluded from banking services because they are deemed too costly, too complex or too risky to serve. The IEA’s 2024 report, Debanked, argues that under the current regime certain categories of customer may present a higher initial risk profile, but that the cost of establishing whether they are, in fact, engaged in criminal activity can exceed the value of their business to the bank. The result is that some accounts are closed pre-emptively.

The same report also estimates that compliance with anti-money laundering regulations costs UK banks £34 billion a year. That is a very significant burden and one that is ultimately borne by consumers and businesses. That is a huge multiple of the £178 million of savings in compliance costs which I think the Minister mentioned. To put it into context, the sums spent on some of the enforcement agencies are also relatively small. Nearly £100 million is spent on the Serious Fraud Office and £195 million on the Insolvency Service. Police funding, because police are very important in money laundering, costs nearly £20 billion, but that includes the excellent efforts of the City of London Police in this area, which were mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

What assessment have the Government made of the impact of the current AML regime on access to banking services? Are the considerable costs—the £34 billion I mentioned—imposed by this regime being matched by clear evidence of a proportionate reduction in financial crime, drawing on the resources I have described? Will the Government consider a broader review not merely of whether the system is functioning according to its own internal processes but whether it is delivering the right outcomes in the real world and whether the enforcement regime is fit for purpose? The Minister has mentioned the economic crime plan.

I turn to the issue of complexity. An anti-money laundering and sanctions regime must be clear if it is to be effective. I know this from my experience of trying to enforce the law in the business area. Professional advisers and regulated entities struggle to understand their obligations. If this happens, the result will naturally be worse enforcement. I was slightly concerned to hear that the Solicitors Regulation Authority has described the UK sanctions regime as “complex and challenging”. That should give us pause for thought. If professionals whose work depends on understanding and applying the law find the regime difficult to navigate, we should not be surprised when banks and firms respond by taking the safest possible course—even when that means withdrawing services from customers who may pose no real risk.

Can the Minister confirm whether organisations such as the SRA were consulted before these regulations were laid? Can he explain whether the regulations will materially reduce the complexity in the system? Do the Government intend to bring forward wider reforms to make the regime easier to understand, easier to apply and therefore more effective in achieving its core purpose and preventing financial crime?

Finally, I turn to redress. The consequences of debanking can be severe. A person or business whose account is closed may be left unable to receive payments, pay staff, meet obligations or even operate normally. Yet the process for challenging these decisions can be slow, opaque and deeply frustrating. In 2024, the APPG on Fair Business Banking published a report which found that thousands of customers were being debanked each month, often as a result of financial, regulatory and reputational pressures on banks. Shortly afterwards, the Treasury Committee published data showing that debanking-related complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service had risen by 44% from 2023. These figures should concern us as they suggest a more systemic problem.

There are also particular groups that appear to be disproportionately affected: individuals with links to higher-risk jurisdictions, politically exposed persons such as ourselves, small businesses, charities and organisations with international connections—at a time when we are trying to encourage overseas investment. A further group the Government should examine closely is defence companies. A survey by ADS, the trade body representing 1,500 small defence companies, found that nearly three-quarters had struggled to access basic banking services, with respondents citing reputational concerns as a key factor behind that trend. I think I will return to this subject when we come to debate the financial services Bill.

These groups are not necessarily illegitimate customers yet, in practice, they seem to be treated, with the way in which the current regime operates, as though they are inherently suspect. Given the Government’s stated priorities of driving economic growth and increasing defence spending, this is surely an issue to which the Minister should be paying close attention. What consideration have the Government given to the impact of the AML regime on these groups? What steps are being taken to ensure that banks do not respond to regulatory pressure by simply excluding legitimate customers? Does the Minister accept that, if increasing numbers of affected customers are turning to the Financial Ombudsman Service, there is a strong case for looking at not just individual complaints but the structure of the regime itself? I asked that question at the beginning of my remarks.

--- Later in debate ---

Finally, on stakeholder engagement with banks, His Majesty’s Government regularly meet and engage with firms and businesses through targeted engagement, such as sector-specific round tables and public consultations, which precedes any legislative change. This is an important aspect of any change to regulations. I know there has been a lot of work done on that as far as this SI is concerned, and we need to continue along that line. We will continue to keep key aspects of the money-laundering regulations under review to ensure that they remain reflective of current economic crime risks.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I have just been musing on something that the noble Lord said that I think I wrote down correctly: namely, that stamp duty reserve tax liability does not indicate a significant link to the UK. We need to consider that statement in the context of how much UK infrastructure and its essential services have been privatised. I am thinking of water companies and infrastructure construction: indeed, large-scale defence companies in foreign ownership. I will understand if the Minister wants to write to me. I am not necessarily asking for a direct answer now, but what provisions do the Government have to make sure that this weakening of the regulation does not open up the ownership of some of those things that in the current geopolitical climate are of grave concern from a security aspect?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

First, this is not a weakening of the regulation but a balanced approach that we take in this whole area. I will set out the arguments in greater form for the noble Baroness and write to her with the specifics.

King’s Speech

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has participated in this interesting debate, even if we know that the country’s attention is largely directed otherwise today. No, I am not talking about what is happening within the Labour Party but in many areas around the country, the politics that has the most immediate impact on the lives of people and communities is changing.

New councillors and new leaders of councils are settling into their roles: 587 of them are Green councillors, two of them our first Green elected mayors. In Hackney, Waltham Forest, Norwich, Hastings and Lewisham, Greens are settling into control of those councils. In news just in, the Green Party’s Matt Jenkins has just been elected leader of Worcestershire County Council, displacing a chaotic Reform Party leadership. He will no doubt be working closely in Worcester city with the wonderful 26 year-old musician Tor Pingree, who is taking over as mayor. As Greens, we are really showing that politics can be done differently, and Worcester woman, and many others, are taking note. I must also note the imbalance between the votes just cast and the number of Greens in your Lordships’ Chamber. It would be nice if that could change in the near future.

I turn to the specifics of today’s debate. I try to praise where I can, so I am pleased to see the desire to build a closer partnership with the EU. I hope that very soon we will restore, at least to our young people, some of the freedoms and opportunities they have lost since Brexit, as we need to see the country move closer to a customs union and the single market, and eventually return to membership. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, I know that the people’s democratic will is not set in stone: it does not last for decades or centuries; it can change. I know that the public understand that if you are in a hole, you should not keep digging.

On our main subject, the economy, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Burns, who offered the Chamber a sombre, realistic view of the UK’s prospects as a middle-ranking power with an ageing population in a world of long-term “global slowdown”, in which

“it looks as though that pattern will continue”.

That showed a realism that we might expect from the Cross Benches but which we urgently need other corners of the House to grasp. The noble Lord also acknowledged—I thank him for recognising that there are alternative economic views to those that have put us in this mess—that not everyone in this Chamber regards growth as the holy grail.

We are not hearing from the Tory Benches or the Labour Front Bench any assessment of whose growth it is. Is it the few getting richer while the rest of us get poorer? Are we building up even further an unstable, insecure financial sector that concentrates wealth in a few hands in a few parts of the country? Are we ensuring that our economy can endure climate, geopolitical and health shocks, and that resilience, rather than spindly, fragile poles, props up the GDP figures? What costs are being borne by exploited human bodies, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle said, or by the already parlous state of nature on these islands and around the world? What costs will future generations bear for any growth that we seek today?

The noble Baroness, Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, spoke about aiming to strengthen and reform our foundations and bring “prosperity to every corner” of the economy. That deserves to be contrasted with the Prime Minister’s introduction to the Speech, which talks about creating “more highly paid jobs”. If we want prosperity in every corner, surely we need to ensure that every job is at least decently paid—one that gives individuals and households security and stability, and the ability to live well now and plan for the future. With, after housing costs, 20% of the population living in poverty, the words we heard from the Chancellor this morning, summarised by the Guardian as,

“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”,

will ring very hollow indeed for many people, including those in poverty and those nearing and fearing it, who find themselves running faster and faster just to barely survive economically.

What would the Greens do instead? For starters, urgent action is needed to bring down people’s bills, and we need rent controls, nationalisation of water, freezing of energy prices and the taxing of wealth. People, particularly those living economically on the edge, are being subjected to an increasingly depleted, polluted environment, which, as we are understanding more and more every day, is terrible for their health.

Where is the environment in the Speech? We have plans that are awful and indefensible, both environmentally and economically—just look at the financial carbon bubble we face already—to expand airports, build roads and slash the regulation of nuclear power plants. Whose back gardens are those plants likely to end up in? Not those in Chelsea or the Cotswolds, we can be sure. My noble friend Lady Jones will cover more of this next week. Additionally, in the promised regulating for growth Bill, we have a vow to “strengthen the growth duty” for Natural England, the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. The Government are lining up with the Tory Benches with an ideological attachment to so-called slashing red tape, an approach that has left us with the unhealthy nation we have now.

Your Lordships’ House has heard me speak often on chemicals regulation, an issue raised this morning by Greenpeace, counting the more than 100 pesticides likely to have been sprayed on your Sunday roast, seven of which are banned in the EU. We might at least see some positive steps there, but I come back to the health of the population—our ageing population. Why is there nothing about this in the Speech and the Government’s presentations of it? Healthy life expectancy in the UK—the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health—fell by two years in the past decade. Healthy life expectancy has now fallen below the state pension age of 66 in more than 90% of areas. In more than one in 10 local areas, healthy life expectancy is below 55 years.

What else is missing? Those who advocate for animal welfare are rightly fuming at one gaping hole. As recently as December 2025, Defra published its Animal Welfare Strategy for England, a document that sets out a series of commitments intended to raise standards, strengthen protections and position the UK as a global leader in animal welfare. In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour promised to

“improve access to nature, promote biodiversity, and protect our landscapes and wildlife”.

Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, can tell me more about the Government’s plans to deliver on this, given they are missing from the Speech.

I also have to mention a report out this week about the state of our universities from the Education Select Committee. It warns that the Government have no clear plans for universities facing insolvency or protections for students who could be caught in that trap. The committee says that 24 universities are at risk of insolvency and closure within 12 months. Many of them, of course, are economically crucial to the communities in which they are placed.

Finally, there are a couple of other missing things. I declare my vice-presidency of the National Association of Local Councils. The Government promised to act on remote and hybrid council meetings, but that is lacking, as are measures to strengthen the framework for standards.

I started with local government and I return to it as the levels of government that, with adequate resources and power, could strengthen many of the foundations of our society—the health of our people, the supply of healthy food, the support for vulnerable children and adults—and rebuild our society in a way that Whitehall, at least under successive legacy parties, has demonstrated it is unable to do, and which this Speech, whether the legislative programme is delivered or whether we have a whole new one in a few weeks, is certainly not going to do.

Secondary International Competitiveness and Growth Objective (FSR Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 11th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, I thank him for giving me the opportunity to reflect on the life of Adam Smith. The noble Lord said that Adam Smith wrote that it was not benevolence that ensured that he got his dinner. I point the noble Lord to a book by the Swedish feminist writer Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? Through all his life, not just when he was a child but including when he was writing The Wealth of Nations, the answer was his mother. The benevolence of his mother kept Adam Smith fed all through her life. Perhaps we should think a bit more about benevolence and caring and those aspects of our society. The inability to see that is, of course, one of the great faults of our current mainstream economics.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for her clear introduction and I thank her and her committee for their labours, even though I come at the issues covered in this report largely from a different perspective, one that is not represented in the report, although it is widely represented in civil society by organisations such as Positive Money, the Finance Innovation Lab, Transparency International and Spotlight on Corruption. While the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and I often agree, I have respectfully to disagree with his statement that we all want to see lighter-touch regulation. I do not agree with that statement. I will, however, commend the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, for raising concerns about the engines of systemic collapse that we face and his commitment to radical institutional reform that is so urgently needed.

In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Mayo, who asked whether in the future the economy will be bigger, smaller or the same, I think that there is a far more important question than that. Will the economy—our financial systems, enterprises and activities on these islands—be able to feed us, house us and not threaten the security and stability of our society and state or those of other states on this single, fragile planet on which we all depend? Will the financial sector be harming or threatening us or supporting our well-being and survival?

It is notable that I am one of few speakers in this debate who does not have to declare financial interests or a past record of working in the financial sector. That is a grave pity. I address this comment to noble Lords who are not in the Committee today but perhaps are reading Hansard tomorrow. It is far too important to the state of our country—to the issues of poverty, inequality, housing and food security, which I will come back to—for these issues of financial regulation to be left only to insiders. These are crucial issues for all of society and we need far broader perspectives on them.

On those broader perspectives, during the passage of the now enacted Financial Services and Markets Bill, I spoke at Second Reading, in Committee and on Report against the inclusion of a competitiveness and growth objective for the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. In its report, the committee focuses on

“the progress made in driving the regulators”—

the word “driving” is interesting—

“to support growth, both in the financial services sector and, crucially, in the wider UK economy … while maintaining the UK’s position as a global financial centre with a robust financial regulatory system”.

As I said at Second Reading, the final cause or aim—robust regulation—is essentially incompatible with growing the sector. Corruption and fraud are so enmeshed in the system that growing it inevitably means growing financial crime, and our regulatory approach is failing to address that. As I said in Committee, we should aim for a more secure financial sector that provides useful, effective and safe services to individuals and the real economy.

As organisations such as the International Monetary Fund have reported, there is an optimal size for a country’s financial sector, at which it provides the services that an economy and population need. Expansion beyond this size causes damage, increases inequality, boosts criminal behaviour and creates many other ills. Among those ills is what is broadly known as the London laundromat—the dirty and corrupt money of oligarchs and dictators that is being deposited, held and, all too often, washed here in London.

That is not in any of our interests. Nor is the level of risk in this age of shocks—geopolitical, climate, health and more. I note that the headline in today’s Financial Times:

“America has become an agent of chaos in world energy markets”.


And it is not just energy markets, of course. It is telling that, as the Evening Standard reports this week, the new Iranian leader of a theocratic, dictatorial, deadly-to-its-own-people regime, Mojtaba Khamenei, the successor to his father, Ali Khamenei, is said to own high-end Kensington properties through associates. They are apartments situated on the sixth and seventh floors of a building close to Kensington Palace and believed to be worth more than £50 million—although there are also servants’ quarters on the ground floor.

Regarding the current lack of regulation and the level of risk taking, a report in today’s Financial Times is headlined:

“Collapse of UK bridging loan specialist has sent reverberations across Wall St amid fears of weak underwriting standards”.


It refers to the refinancing merry-go-round of Market Financial Solutions, into which Barclays, Jefferies, Santander and many others put hundreds of millions of pounds before it suddenly collapsed last month amid allegations of fraud and double pledging of collateral, with creditors claiming a shortfall of £1.3 billion, and about £283 million unaccounted for.

My focus would be not, as in recommendation 1 from the committee, the cost of compliance but rather the costs and risks of non-compliance. These are practical costs and reputational costs, as the UK seeks to establish its place in a fast-changing, unstable geopolitical environment. I note in that context that the latest Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International shows that Britain has been slipping down the rankings since 2015. We were in seventh place then, and we are now in 20th place, with a score of 70 out of 100. That is a scoring of our financial regulation and how the outside world sees this.

Lest it be thought that I am picking just one example, I note that some other work by Transparency International identified a £40 million central London commercial property held by a company controlled by a trustee who is a member of a Singaporean money laundering gang serving time in jail, as well as £55 million-worth of commercial property owned by a former Malaysian Finance Minister via trusts—he died before a criminal trial into his wealth could take place.

I have identified areas in which I very much disagree with the committee, and I will now pick up some points with which I agree to some degree, particularly that made by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, and touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes: the failure of the financial sector to actually serve the real economy. I am drawing here particularly on excellent work by Positive Money and the figure that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, mentioned: only 6.6% of bank lending last year went towards productive investment in the real economy.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

As I was saying, only 6.6% of bank lending last year went towards productive industries in the real economy— I am basing this on Positive Money. The group used the Bank of England’s annual money and credit statistics to find that net lending to productive industries increased by just £9 billion last year, compared with £52 billion for mortgages and £68 billion for the finance, insurance and real estate sectors.

To break that down, lending to electricity, gas and water industries made up more than half of the increase among all the productive industries. I have to slightly question the “productive” label, given that we know that the privatised water sector in particular has seen a huge amount of payments out in terms of dividends and fat-cat pay and has continued to be loaded down with debt. There is a question over how productive that actually is. Manufacturers and transportation firms did indeed see a small uptick in credit, which is encouraging, but lending to the wholesale and retail trade fell by £1.8 billion—a decline for the fourth year running. In these figures—this picks up points made by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell—mortgages accounted for 57% of bank lending and the FIRE sectors for 28% of lending. We are seeing a real misallocation of resources if we come back to the questions with which I started: is the financial sector making sure that we can feed ourselves, house ourselves and be secure in a very uncertain world?

One of the other things that this is very much associated with, as Positive Money often draws attention to, is rising inequality. For people who own assets, this lending funds further increases in the price of those assets, while people without assets are left even further behind. In fact, it is interesting that mortgages are the only type of lending that has seen significant increases in outstanding credit since the last financial crisis. This is one of the main reasons why property prices have skyrocketed. It is of course very clearly interlinked with the housing crisis that is affecting so many millions of people.

I will conclude with a point that I do not believe anyone else has raised but that I think is important. It is about the importance of financial education, and I entirely agree with the committee in its recommendation on this. I note this with regard to the Department for Education, as there is now an independent curriculum review. This surely has to be part of that review in focusing on ensuring that our schools provide education for life, to help people to live rather than just for exams or just for jobs. I also agree with the recommendations— I think the Government broadly agreed too—that the Treasury must work with the FCA and the industry to support adult education about finance. There is a huge inequality of arms in the information that consumers have when they are faced with the financial sector.

The noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, raised the issue of cryptocurrencies. That is perhaps a particularly extreme area where we are seeing the targeting of younger people and people from minoritised communities, but, for everybody, many feel a real fear when confronted with having to deal with the financial sector, particularly online. Increasingly, of course, most dealings are online. This is something that stresses people out. They worry about being ripped off or about being the subject of fraud—of course, we are the global fraud capital. Giving the public—consumers—the tools to try to somewhat level the playing field with the financial sector is a crucial point on which I can entirely agree with the committee.

Barnett Formula: Wales

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I would dispute what the noble Baroness has just said—I do not recognise that picture of what is going on in Wales. Obviously, the increase in the amount of funding that will go to Wales through the Barnett formula is welcome. As I pointed out, there is more direct funding to Wales as well, such as the £80 million for port investment to support floating offshore wind developments in Port Talbot, and £160 million each over 10 years for investment zones in Cardiff city region and Wrexham and Flintshire. There is a lot going on in Wales, there is a lot to be proud of, and there is a lot for the Welsh Government to boast about.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

We will hear from the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The strengthened representation and increased democracy we are about to see in Wales with the Senedd elections under the new system surely add further weight to the needs-based argument of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, for looking again at improving the Barnett formula for Wales. Should the elected people closest to the voters, truly representing them, not have adequate resources to deliver on their aspirations?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

To repeat what I have said before, Wales and the other devolved authorities have done really well out of the Barnett formula this time around. It is the biggest increase in their funding from the Barnett formula since 1998. The money is there and it is up to the elected Assembly to decide how it is going to spend it, so that democracy is there. All I can say is that the best result we could get at the next election is a Labour Assembly.

Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 (Mutual Recognition Agreement) (Switzerland) Regulations 2025

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this statutory instrument, which, as he said, implements the UK’s commitment to the agreement between the UK and the Swiss Confederation on mutual recognition in financial services.

I note that the explanation of the SI says that it will, as the Minister said, allow the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority to essentially oversee and ensure that nothing is going wrong and have oversight of Swiss operations here. That is perhaps not as reassuring as one might hope. I note a report in the Times yesterday that the Financial Conduct Authority had privately shared concerns about the 79th Group with the City of London Police eight months before the group collapsed, owing thousands of people more than £200 million. It is, to quote the Times,

“suspected of being one of the largest Ponzi schemes in British history”.

I note for the record that the company denies any wrongdoing. None the less, the Financial Conduct Authority appears to have had concerns but did not share those with consumers, who are clearly now very much paying the price.

It is worth reflecting that it is a little bit surprising that, as the Minister said, this reflects an agreement that was struck in December 2023 by the previous Government. They said that this was a

“ground-breaking pact on financial services cooperation”

and that it would enable

“frictionless, cross-border provision of financial services between the UK and Switzerland”.

It is interesting that a Government who have been elected on a promise of change now appear to be delivering exactly the agenda with the same kind of terminology as that of the previous Government who they replaced.

It is important to put on the record and focus on the reality of Swiss banking, which is deeply corrupt and non-transparent. If we take, for example, the Tax Justice Network’s financial secrecy index, Switzerland ranks second, and that is not a good result—it is second worst. The UK ranks at number 20, which is relatively good comparatively. Yet we now appear to be seamlessly linking up these two systems, linking our system into a more secret system, with considerable risks. Switzerland also ranks fifth on the Tax Justice Network’s corporate tax haven index, so it is complicit in multinational companies’ tax abuse in particular. The Tax Justice Network estimates the cost to other countries of the Swiss operations to be $21 billion a year.

Perhaps this is a specific question to the Minister. As regards the worldwide rise of automatic exchange of information notes in the past decade or so, in which Governments are supposed to exchange relevant financial information with their peers to help them enforce criminal and tax laws, Switzerland has carved out exceptions to these so-called AEOI notes. So, Article 47 of the Federal Act on Banks and Article 127 of the direct federal tax Act, which still provide for secrecy, have not changed. That is going to be accessing our system and under Swiss law we will not be able to see what is happening. There has been talk of using trusts to replace some of the secrecy instead, but of course trusts are one of the issues that are a major problem.

I note in particular the work of Maria-Gabriella Sarmiento—I do not know whether the Minister has seen this, but I certainly encourage him to look at it—who completed a PhD at the University of Zaragoza about the estimated losses of between $20 and $40 billion for corruption practices, of which Switzerland is a significant destination for that money. Over 20 years,

“assets from at least 33 jurisdictions have been traced to Swiss banks … primarily proceeds of grand corruption, money laundering and other crimes”,

with their estimated values ranging between $112 billion and $514 billion.

The reality is, of course, that the UK and Switzerland are quite similar: they have expansive banking sectors, sophisticated wealth management services and market high-value assets. They are prime destinations for the corrupt to stash their money. To take one practical example from Transparency International, Carlos de São Vicente, a former CEO of a partially state-owned insurance company in Angola, embezzled more than $1.2 billion through Bermuda-registered companies; he then transferred substantial sums to Switzerland. That is one case where someone has been found out, but it is a sample of what a great many people we know are doing without being found out and without me being able to name the details.

I note also that, in 2023, Swiss regulators inspected their institutions and found that 50% had largely unsatisfactory anti-money laundering systems. I do not know whether the Minister can tell me whether there have been significant improvements in that area of money laundering since then.

It is very sad that this important statutory instrument is getting so little attention and focus and that it is happening in this Room, because it is crucial. We have to situate this in the context of the grave concerns—it is not just me who is expressing them—about the state of financial stability in our current system, for all kinds of reasons that I will not go into here. This is about linking up two systems that have great problems with corruption and a lack of transparency—two of the biggest systems in the world—and I cite a former Conservative Minister saying that 40% of the world’s dirty money goes through the City of London and the British Crown dependencies. I do not have a comparable figure for Switzerland, but I have no doubt that it is significant. We are linking up these two sets of money flows, which has to be a concern.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, this statutory instrument gives legal effect to the mutual recognition agreement between the UK and Switzerland known as the Bern financial services agreement. As the Minister has so clearly outlined, the agreement enables the UK and Swiss financial firms to provide services to each other’s markets, particularly in wholesale sectors, such as investment services, insurance and banking, without needing to establish a local presence or duplicate regulatory approvals.

The UK’s position as a global financial centre depends on maintaining strong transparent relationships with trusted international partners. We therefore welcome this agreement with Switzerland, developed on our watch. Mutual recognition, when accompanied by effective supervision and regulatory co-operation, can deliver meaningful benefits to both markets. Under this agreement, Swiss firms will be able to operate in the UK under the supervision of Swiss regulators, with the FCA and PRA granted powers to step in if issues arise—as the Minister explained. The same applies to UK firms offering services in Switzerland.

With that in mind, I would be grateful if the Minister could address the following points. First, I would like to probe the Swiss end. Has Switzerland yet put in place what is needed there to allow UK firms to benefit from mutual recognition? If not, when will this be done? What are the nature and scale of benefits to the UK financial institutions? That seems an important point.

Secondly, turning to our end, how confident are the Government that UK regulators have the necessary tools to monitor Swiss firms’ activities and act swiftly if concerns emerge? What protections are in place for UK clients—not only high net-worth individuals but small firms—should something go wrong?

Thirdly, on timing, why has it taken nearly two years from signing the agreement in December 2023 to putting this framework in place? Has there been a problem with the regulators not being ready or is the Treasury not working at pace?

I was grateful for the reply of the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, to my Question on 16 September, reporting that, by July this year, 51% of assimilated EU law—most of it in financial services—had been repealed, amended or replaced. This was a much lower figure than I had hoped for, given the importance of financial services to growth. I am not sure whether the Swiss regulations—the one set that we are debating and the negative set that is not being debated—will be included in the count in that definition, but the point about pace generally is important. The Official Opposition have been supportive of the transformation process, and there is no excuse for delay.

No doubt the Minister will respond on some of the reservations of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and perhaps explain how things have improved in Switzerland over time. But I note that there will be information sharing as part of the deal, which is important. However, how will Parliament be kept informed of the operation of this agreement, particularly in the event of regulatory diversion or dispute, or a bad case of the kind that was asked about?

In conclusion, we support efforts to deepen co-operation with trusted international partners in financial services, but it is vital that it is done without compromising consumer protection or financial stability, and that it delivers the trading benefits that we all hope to see. I look forward to the Minister’s response, ideally today but otherwise in writing.

--- Later in debate ---

The SI is a flagship deliverable under the Government’s strategy to enhance the UK’s position as a global financial centre by facilitating mutual recognition and regulatory co-operation with Switzerland. It supports increased cross-border trade flows, reduces duplicative regulatory burdens and strengthens the UK’s competitiveness in wholesale financial services. This SI is important because it translates an international agreement into practical and enforceable UK law, unlocking new opportunities for cross-border financial services trade and underpinning the UK’s wider strategy for growth and competitiveness in this sector.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I will ask a fairly technical question, so I will entirely understand if the noble Lord wishes to write to me about it. In his response, he said that this SI avoids duplicating regulatory burdens, but he also said that the Swiss companies would be covered by our anti-money laundering laws. As I referred to in my original contribution, my understanding is that transparency is avoided under Swiss law. I do not claim to be an expert on Swiss law; obviously I am taking advice here. Article 47 of the federal Act on banks and Article 127 of the direct federal tax Act effectively allow Swiss institutions to avoid scrutiny and reporting. But we are then saying that this will have to be covered by our anti-money laundering laws. As I said, I am not expecting the noble Lord to give me a response now, but could he commit to write to me about that issue of transparency and anti-money laundering, as well as how we can avoid duplication and ensure that we have our own anti-money laundering regulations?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

Obviously, I will write with further detail but, as I said, the regulators will be held to account for what they do. This requires transparency—that is one of our stipulations—but I can write to the noble Baroness with further detail about that.

Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 (Capital Buffers and Macro-prudential Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2025

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Grand Committee

The capital buffers SI updates references to the capital buffer regulations in other legislation now that the underlying regulations have been restated through the powers in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023. The markets in financial instruments SI ensures that key definitions are maintained in legislation so that investment firms have clarity over the regulatory perimeter when the underlying regulations are revoked. Together, these measures support the UK’s transition to a modern, proportionate regulatory regime—one that upholds high standards and supports the competitiveness of our financial services sector. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for outlining what he identified as a very technical and detailed set of two instruments. I came into the Committee not sure whether I was going to speak or not. I listened very carefully to the Minister’s tone and, as I was doing that, I was looking at the Bank of England’s financial stability report from July 2025. It said that uncertainty around the global outlook has intensified. It says of financial markets that they have been highly volatile. Weakness in non-bank finance can amplify risk. It says of UK households and businesses that, overall, they continue to be resilient. I am not quite sure that that, particularly the last one on households, reflects the experience that many people who are listening to this Committee have—if they are very bored this afternoon. None the less, there we are.

Some of the things that the Minister said in the introduction concerned me slightly. One of them started with “widely supported by industry”. We are hopefully thinking about the national interest rather than just the interests of the financial sector and, perhaps, the wilder reaches of the financial sector. It was described as essential for companies operating these core businesses. We are talking about complex financial instrument derivatives here. From the words of the Minister, it is clear that the Government are heading in the same direction as the previous Government.

Of course, not just the apparent complexion of the Government but the global situation has changed tremendously, so I have one question for the Minister. Are the Government keeping under constant review the foundational conditions in which the financial sector is operating and ensuring that everything they do is not increasing the level of risks that the financial sector presents to the security of us all?

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I recognise that these two statutory instruments deal with technical measures and in and of themselves have limited impact. They are essentially a tidy-up of the text to reflect broader changes made since Brexit to the financial regulatory system. The FSMA 2023 SI transfers to the PRA responsibility for setting the capital buffers that banks are required to hold in addition to minimum capital requirements. The PRA is a strong regulator, but it has taken a series of measures to move in the direction of lighter touch, motivated by its competitiveness and growth objective. I have spoken before about my concern that the PRA, for example, is increasingly willing to turn a blind eye to the illiquidity of assets. When powers are transferred to the PRA, as they are by this SI, a significant measure of transparency, accountability and parliamentary oversight disappears. Capital buffers are critical to the stability of the banking system, and I remain concerned when parliamentary oversight in this key area is significantly weakened, as it is by the measures that both surround and are then captured by this SI.

The second statutory instrument deals with the markets in financial instruments and again affects a transfer of power and responsibility, this time to both the FCA and the PRA. Once again, it is a move to a less transparent and less accountable system. The rules can now be changed, presumably in line with the smarter regulatory framework that the Government have put forward, and they both allow divergence from the EU and a lighter-touch approach. Divergence has its own risk, as it has implications for cross-border business, and Parliament will not have a voice any more than as a significant consultee. Frankly, experience suggests that the regulators look at Parliament’s views in these consultations and treat them as relatively irrelevant compared to the views of industry.

I note that the Minister described the regulators as expert, independent regulators. He would have used exactly that same phrasing before the 2007 crash, and we still live with the repercussions of that crash. Blind trust in the regulator is exceedingly inadvisable. I have tried in previous speeches to list some of the erosions of protections that were introduced after the crash. They include: the competitiveness and growth objective for regulators; the changing to matching adjustment; insolvency UK; significantly increasing the illiquidity of the insurance sector; the removal of the cap on bankers’ bonuses; the permanent permission for pension funds to transact derivatives without using central counterparties, thereby avoiding putting in place margin collateral, which puts them seriously at risk in any kind of financial volatility in unstable times; the watering down of the senior managers’ regime, which is key to accountability; the weakening of the financial ombudsman; the pressure on pension funds to invest in high-risk, illiquid assets; and the uncertainty that now exists around bank ring-fencing.

That is a partial list of the erosions that I have been able to pick up, and I am sure that, if the Government sat down and thought about it, they could come up with a far longer list and perhaps even suggest that this was a huge positive. But it is notable that Parliament will have no further say, now that these SIs have gone through, any more than just an ordinary consultee, in a further erosion of these various protections. Frankly, while Parliament will get reports that will allow it to look at the impact, that will be very much in retrospect, which I suggest is very late in the day.

I repeat a request that I have made before for the Government to publish a compendium of the changes that have been made that increase risk in the financial sector and a look at those risk implications. My view is that, without that degree of transparency, Parliament cannot do its proper job.