Official Listing of Securities, Prospectus and Transparency (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

I declare my interest as a director of the London Stock Exchange, the relevance of which I am sure your Lordships can appreciate. I sometimes stop and wonder, “Okay, what would actually happen if we didn’t have one of these SIs?” Prospectuses would not go away; we would just have some annoying things to do with the EU and our regulators having to deal with it that would be single-ended, and I am not sure how it would all work. I am not suggesting that that is a solution but I am not sure that we would entirely be falling into a bottomless pit.

I have two fairly generic comments to make about this SI. First, in paragraph 92—I am not quite sure of what; I think it is the impact assessment—there is quite a good explanation of the transfer of functions that has been going on for loads of the statutory instruments that quite often have been debated in a much more lonely way in the Moses Room. As has been said, the Treasury takes over the powers of the Commission and then the binding technical standards go to the regulators. By and large that means that we are not really going to see a great deal of detail because the basic legislation is already done and in our legislation, and from now on significant changes are probably going to come in the technical standards. Of course, we do not have an entirely equivalent position with the EU here because we do not get a vote on the binding technical standards, whereas the European Parliament gets a vote, as indeed does the Council, if it wishes to negate the equivalent standards that come from the European supervisory authorities. From that point of view, it is sad that there has not been some kind of public consultation because it might have been the only sniff that they will ever get at it, unless there are more people like me, who make a nuisance of themselves by responding to the stakeholder consultations that regulators put out.

That was a general statement. There are two asymmetries in this piece of legislation that illustrate what is going on quite a lot of the time. One is that we will continue to recognise EU international financial reporting standards. That is a good thing in terms of openness and the ability and ease with which a prospectus can be done in the UK, but the other side of the coin is that the EU has said that it will not recognise, for example, audits done according to UK IFRS. I do not know whether it will continue with that as a generic ploy—I think it hurts the EU rather than us—but it illustrates the difference in openness and the position that the UK is taking on these things. A similar asymmetry occurs with grandfathering. We are saying, “Okay, if the prospectus has already been agreed before we leave the EU, it will be honoured for the 12-month duration that it’s allowed”, whereas I am afraid the EU has said that it will be cut off at the time of Brexit.

I do not think that those asymmetries harm us at all, but there are quite a lot of them spread throughout and some do operate in a harmful way. There are some of these—what was it?—“distinguished” lawyers who advise companies that they are better to operate out of the EU because the EU will not recognise us, whereas we will recognise the EU. I am not suggesting that we could necessarily operate in a different way, but industry has not always got what it wanted out of these engagements and would have sometimes preferred the Government to be a little more equivocal and to have waited to see on one or two of these things, so that, if you like, the balance of lack of knowledge was roughly the same.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. She just said something that alarms me greatly, which is that there will now be two forms of IFRS, one for the EU and the other for the UK. That seems to be a matter of enormous significance, and extremely undesirable. It means that you will not be able to make exact comparisons between potential investments in the UK and the rest of the EU.

Let us suppose you are doing a study of the pharmaceutical industry and you find that, in earnings per share, Glaxo or AstraZeneca has been progressing at a certain rate over the years, and German equivalents such as Bayer have different figures for growth of earnings per share. You are making comparisons, but the comparisons are falsified because of the different accounting conventions. Some of them might be very substantial. For example, if you change the conventions on amortisation of good will, that can be a very substantial figure in a balance sheet in a profit and loss account; it has a bearing on how you account for it. This is very serious, because it would be a serious reduction in the transparency of the financial markets, which would be of great disadvantage to individual investors, of course, but ultimately to firms themselves and their ability to raise money, and to the health of the financial markets, which we all depend on.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. A statutory instrument on the endorsement of IFRS will be coming along from BEIS—I am already taking an interest in that. IFRS will still be a global standard, but I think there are now 144 countries that adopt and endorse them, in their own particular way. They normally go straight through, but there is sometimes a certain amount of adjustment; the Japanese have made some adjustments, as have the Australians. In fact, the EU has also done so here and there. I do not think the intention is that the UK-endorsed IFRS will differ from the EU ones, but—I say this with regret—that does not stop the EU saying that it will not recognise as equivalent those that are endorsed in the UK.

Recognising the need for continuity and stability in the financial markets, although the UK might have made rather a mess of it at the Brexit negotiation level, we probably have the high ground when it comes to how we are dealing with the conversion of legislation, given that it has to happen. However, I am just pointing out that some of the asymmetries—not these two, particularly—cause some difficulty. I think the IFRS one, such as it is, will cause more difficulty to the EU than to the UK.

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to express my concern from these Benches that we may set some dangerous precedents in the processes that we are adopting in discussing and passing these SIs. I understand the difference between consultation and engagement on these issues but I have significant concerns. If the SI was indeed ready on 21 November, there has been time for a proper consultation, which does not seem to have occurred. It would be helpful to the House if we had more information on what engagement has taken place.

I fully accept that, as my noble friend Lord Leigh has said, industry is in favour of adopting these regulations, should we enter a no-deal scenario. However, there are reasons for us to be concerned across the House at the procedures taking place. We are being asked to approve legislation based on evidence that we perhaps feel is incomplete. I will not vote against the Government but I would like to express my concerns.

Equivalence Determinations for Financial Services and Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment etc) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this statutory instrument. I note that paragraph 77 of the consolidated impact assessment states:

“This does not remove the general need to review and improve legislation, which HM Treasury remains committed to doing in due course and where appropriate”.


Following the debates we had on the Financial Services (Implementation of Legislation) Bill, there are areas which might improve the financial services community and be for the benefit of the public and companies seeking to raise capital without the confines of some EU regulations; in particular, for small companies and for existing public companies that are seeking to raise capital from existing shareholders. At the moment, due to the expensive costs of a prospectus, they are prohibited from so doing. Although I have never prepared an impact assessment, I cannot imagine how one can be prepared in this sector, because there are so many potential benefits that might arise from this. I refer your Lordships’ House to my registered interests.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I too declare my interest in the register with regard to the London Stock Exchange.

I will make a couple of points on specifics, but before that I will say that I agree with noble Lords who have spoken about the manner in which things have had to be done and are done, rather than possibly what is done. By and large, the Treasury has performed well in fixing what it has to fix, but it has fallen down, possibly through lack of time, sometimes on Explanatory Memoranda and definitely on impact assessments. One of the things is that the public hardly seem to appear in the commentary. When the Minister introduced this statutory instrument, he said that equivalence was beneficial—it is in several ways—because for one thing it aided competition. He then said that that was to the benefit of consumers. That was about the only reference to consumers.

If prudential requirements are lower, does that benefit the consumer? It surely does in one sense: if the costs to businesses are less, perhaps the services to the consumer are less, but what does that do for stability? There are lots of questions about that, and the whole scene is not set. If I may say so, I may be the only person who was in the room when every one of these equivalence provisions was put in place, so I know why they are different, but it is still very difficult on some of the other SIs that we are dealing with even for me to work out exactly what is going on.

Financial Services Contracts (Transitional and Saving Provision) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Lords Chamber

In summary, the Government believe that the proposed legislation is necessary to ensure that existing contractual obligations can continue to be met, thereby avoiding disruption and losses for UK businesses and consumers in the event that the UK leaves the EU without a deal or an implementation period. I hope that this explanation is helpful and that noble Lords will join me in supporting this measure, which I beg to move.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for his introduction. Just in case, I will declare my interest as a director of the London Stock Exchange Group plc; obviously, this would not affect the exchange, but I guess that it could be relevant to some of our competitors. Perhaps it would have been useful if we could have had one of those flow diagrams like the ones you make when you are trying to create your algorithm, to see the way through this. I will try to do that in my own little way, but it will have to be with words.

It seems that any passporting firm that provides services at the moment can continue by going into the temporary permissions regime, and then it can either become authorised or can bounce out of that regime because it will not go for a permanent authorisation; that has been contained mainly in things that we have dealt with previously. When we come to this provision, which is quite useful, those that are not intended to continue to be authorised indefinitely can either go into the supervised run-off, which does what it says on the tin in that they continue to be supervised here, or they can go into the contractual run-off, which relies on their home member state because they do not have an entity here. So you go into the supervised one when there is a branch here and you go into the contractual one if you do not have a branch here. That is clear.

However, I wonder what is going on when you might start to yo-yo between one and the other. It says that you can go from the SRO into the CRO; I suppose I could understand that if the branch closed down, so that it was going to be doing it remotely—is that how it is envisaged? What would cause the regulator to move it from the SRO into the CRO? Obviously, if there is a branch and you are in a run-off, there may come a point at which you say, “Hey, I want to close this branch and disappear”—so that seems to be one reason why you might need it. I was not quite clear why you might want to go the other way, from the CRO into the SRO, if there is no entity here to regulate—I cannot see that a branch would be invented. I could not quite understand why one would go in that direction.

Then there seemed to be a carve-out of some of the more important organisations, such as fund managers, trustees and depositories, and I can understand that they have to go into the temporary permissions regime—I agree with that. We are then probably dealing here on the markets side with smaller organisations. However, I was not quite sure how long they could be hanging around for. It says that it could be five years after entry into the regime; then it says that that is whether they enter on exit day or enter after having been in the TPR. So if they have been in the TPR, which is a year but which can keep on being extended, is there an end stop? Could some of these be hanging around for about 10 years, if the TPR was extended a few times and then they went into the SRO and the CRO for another five years? That seems a long time; I would have thought that five years for the combination might have been enough.

I was thinking that when of course I got to the parts such as those on the trade repositories and CCPs, where the PRA is in charge. There it is a much stricter regime, and quite rightly so, because you are looking here at market infrastructure and potentially bigger effects. However, there it will be a non-extendable period of one year or, in the second scenario, if they have been in the temporary permissions previously, the recognition may be adjusted—but, again, it will be no longer than one year. So it looks like they have been thinking around the problem I have related with regard to the market side of things. So that was in sharp contrast. My only concern was for how long as a maximum an organisation could be in the TPR and then in one of the run-off situations, because it does not make that clear.

Apart from that, I have no particular comment, and obviously it seems to be a very sensible provision to have made for the benefit of the stability of business that is going on in the UK. It would be very welcome if we knew that there was reciprocity in the rest of the EU for this, and it would be even better if we did not have to do it at all—but I suppose it is making the best of things in the circumstances.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I have just one quick question to follow on from the comments of my colleague, who is so much better versed in this than me. It struck me that we seem to have one timetable proposed by the FCA and a different one proposed by the PRA, without an awful lot of logic as to why one takes one approach and the other takes another. Are these two regulators working completely independently and sending over their various paragraphs that then get incorporated into the statutory instrument, or is there some coherent framework? If the regulators are not working together, what can we do to make sure that they will? It will be complicated enough for business without trying to work out which regulator is thinking which way. I would assume—I do not know—that some entities find that they face both regulators. Why the difference under the new rules that each regulator is bringing forward?

Solvency 2 and Insurance (Amendment, etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, especially those in respect of the insurance and reinsurance industries. I will speak briefly to two of the three statutory instruments: the Solvency II and insurance regulations and the insurance distribution regulations.

Turning to the Solvency II and insurance regulations, and thinking about the near term, I congratulate the drafters of the statutory instrument; I know the ABI has been sitting with Treasury and PRA officials. First, it gives great comfort to the board of an insurer or reinsurer in the near term—I was thinking about how I would analyse it. It gives certainty on capital required, rollover for capital models and the ability to use reinsurance as temporary capital, and the asset values in an insurer’s balance sheet are unaffected. Secondly, I think the mutual equivalence regime is clever. It would have been possible to put equivalence for EU countries in the statutory instrument, but instead it is left to the Treasury to decide what to do. I think that is important because otherwise it would be possible for us to grant equivalence and then find that our Lloyd’s market had no equivalence granted back to it in the EU, which would be quite wrong. Mutuality of interest is preserved by that. Finally, I think the selection of measures designed to reduce that horror for all insurers, multiple regulation of the same action, is as good as can be done in the circumstances, so I congratulate the drafters on that.

However, thinking about the longer term, I put a question to the Minister. Solvency II—which came into force on 1 January 2016, for those who did not know, and is a regulation dating from 2009—is very much a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of having the right amount of capital in your insurance market. Accordingly, it was not designed for the British situation. If you look at equivalent regimes in other jurisdictions—I am particularly familiar with the Bermuda jurisdiction, which is equivalent to the EU, but there are others such as Japan, Australia, Canada and the US, which is of course 50 jurisdictions in insurance terms—it seems that some changes could be made.

Your Lordships might well ask for some examples and I can think of two. There is a lot of gold plate around; that can go away. But one dynamic that has always surprised me is that over the last 15 years or so a large number of insurers and reinsurers have been set up, notably in Bermuda, while I do not think any have been set up here in the UK, the home of insurance. A review could properly investigate that dynamic. There are many reasons for it but I hope a review could address them because, to be competitive, I hope that new insurers and reinsurers will be born here, and soon. I would like to hear the Minister’s views on whether a review is warranted and can be expected.

I turn to the insurance distribution regulations. The directive on insurance distribution came in during 2016 and was the update to the 2002 insurance mediation directive. Insurance brokers were then hit by a regulation in 2017, which expanded on the directive, and in 2018 were hit by GDPR. A substantial series of changes have thus been made to how they need to operate, and a period of stability for them would be quite important. I come from the insurance underwriting world but I know the absolute necessity of having a healthy insurance intermediary world to feed our insurance underwriters.

One statistic that is a little worrying is that when the FSA, as it then was, took over the regulation of brokers there were 8,000 insurance brokers in Britain. Britain now has a bigger economy and we are down to under 5,000 of them, which does not feel right to me. I know that it is extremely difficult to found new insurance businesses. Does the Minister feel that, in the longer term, a review would be warranted here? It could seek out gold plate—insurance brokers are sure, and I am convinced, that the cost of regulation in this country is far greater than in other EU countries—but also look at why we have a shrinking number of brokers and why it is so difficult to start up a new broking business. A good review there would certainly give us a fitter and healthier insurance industry.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for his introduction. When I was involved in legislation in Europe, Solvency II was perhaps the first time that I discovered that I could be right while the Treasury was wrong. When I chaired the committee that gave me the confidence to trust my own judgment and to have few, if any, disagreements with the Treasury.

As it was originally done, Solvency II did not manage to cater for everything that the UK needed. In particular, we forgot about annuities; so did the ABI and the Treasury. I have to tell your Lordships that Parliament did not forget about annuities, but we were not strong enough to work out what to do about that because there was a big row going on, particularly between the UK and France, on equities and volatility. When I came back and discovered that I was to chair the committee, one of the first things on my agenda was Omnibus II, which aimed to sort things these out. We had the volatility adjustment for France; we had extrapolation for bonds in the eurozone, which were desperately needed by Germany; we also had the so-called matching adjustment, which we needed because otherwise the fact that insurance companies naturally tried to match the term of the assets that they collected to their liabilities would have been forbidden. They were supposed to account for their assets separately from assessing their liabilities, which in the business of annuities is a pretty stupid thing to do. Because we were having to box and cox with three other things, that meant that the solutions were probably less than perfect in the end, so in the fullness of time it might perhaps be made a little more perfect.

Financial Services (Implementation of Legislation) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 6th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I may say a word or two to put this discussion into perspective. This side hates the idea of a no-deal exit and so on, but the Bill is an outstanding example of co-operation by the Government. The Bill has changed massively from the one introduced at Second Reading. The Government facilitated discussions with the Minister and officials. It is now a much better Bill and, given its task, which we abhor, it is nevertheless a good Bill.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests as set out in the register. I also express my thanks to the Minister and his officials, along with other noble Lords who tabled amendments. We have a more than satisfactory outcome. We now have much greater transparency, some new procedures under which the Government will report on what is going to happen and tables to show us where things have gone. I hope this will perhaps lay the ground for how some other things, in what may be more fortunate circumstances than Brexit, could continue in the future. On behalf of these Benches, I thank the noble Lord and the officials.

Financial Services (Implementation of Legislation) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 29th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I shall speak briefly in support of the Government and the clause as drafted, primarily because of the points just made by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey. When I went to the Oxford English Dictionary to check, I got the results he has just described, but it seems to me that the Government’s choice of word is better than the one now being advanced by the noble Lords, Lord Sharkey and Lord Davies. I urge my noble friend to be of good courage and stick with it.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for a good set of amendments that respond across the piece to concerns that were raised in Committee. I shall probe a little further on what can and cannot be done for the purpose of clarification.

Clause 1(1) states that this is about converting,

“the provisions, or any of the provisions, of any specified EU financial services legislation”.

So the option is still there not to convert it or to convert only parts of it. At an earlier stage, I suggested that that could be adapted. I noticed that when the Minister spoke, he used the word “files” as if the files were all transposed at once, but we must recognise that some things may not be transposed. I believe that is the intention. Here, I should give my usual reminder to the House of my interests as set out in the register, in particular as a director of the London Stock Exchange. In the first set of EU legislation—that which is completed but not yet active—you could still omit some or all of it and do an EU-type adaptation, but you could not adapt it if you chose to convert it. It has got to be relatively straightforward.

For the not yet completed, there is greater flexibility. I have a few little tests of my own to see whether this would be allowed. First, what if you wanted to keep a current provision instead of having a new one? That is quite simple: you probably just leave it out and do not convert it, which falls within what is allowed. If you want to reflect more closely an international standard—let us say that the EU has embellished it in some way—could you do that? I think you probably could because you are still going back to the originating international standard, but it would be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say about that. What if you want to reflect more closely UK market data because it has been calibrated on EU data, by then absent us? I expect most of that happens in technical standards, but it would be interesting to have the Minister’s view on whether the Government could make such a change. I think it would be allowable.

What about aligning with alternative provisions made in other major international markets? That would be departing from alignment with the EU into alignment with somewhere else. Let us say that you wanted to align tick sizes with Hong Kong or the US, rather than staying with the EU regime. Would that be allowed? I think that is quite a marginal issue. The Minister does not have to use that particular example, but it would be interesting to know where that would lie in the tests. If you want to avoid disrupting the functioning of UK markets—the sort of comment you often hear—you are probably left with the option of not converting that element.

My final test is, what happens about proportionality for SMEs and SME markets? I am not sure how that would work out: if the legislation has not included proportionality, is it reasonable and within scope to put some proportionality in? That measure is probably relatively popular from a UK perspective, so it would be nice to know whether that could be covered.

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, I too refer to my declaration of interest in the Members’ register, which has not changed since I last spoke. Despite my interest, I confess that I had some difficulty understanding all of subsection (1A)(b) of the proposed new section. The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, read out the easy bit. The difficult bit is the words,

“but does not include changes that result in provision whose effect is different in a major way from that of the legislation”.

I think I understand the intent, but I am not sure that the words are exactly as another draftsman might have chosen to put it.

I am today looking for an assurance from the Minister that the adjustments he proposes will allow the Government the flexibility needed: in particular, if there is a restriction on changes that might be significant or major, that these will not bite where change really is needed if we leave the EU with no deal. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, has said, this legislation will come into play only if we have left without a deal—which nobody in this House seeks as a primary option—and in those unfortunate circumstances, we might need to be as flexible as possible.

By way of example, in respect of article 2(e) of the prospectus regulation, the alleviations granted by the EU were a compromise designed to suit all member states’ markets, all of which are very much smaller than the UK’s. The Government should adjust these to make them proportionate to the scale of the relevant UK markets. For example, the threshold below which public offers—an area I am particularly interested in—are exempt from the requirement to publish a prospectus, which is a huge cost, has been set at €8 million. By the way, initially it was agreed to be €2 million, then it went up to €5 million without any issues and then it became €8 million. For the UK market alone, a more appropriate level might be, say, £20 million.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, referred to the definition of SME growth markets, which is a very important term. The definition was of course a compromise designed to suit all member states’ markets, and to avoid in some instances classifying members’ entire national stock market as an SME growth market, which would be a bit unfortunate. Perhaps the Government want to adjust this to make it proportionate to the scale of the relevant UK markets, possibly increasing the maximum market capitalisation from €200 million to £500 million.

Outside of article 2(e), I have mentioned at earlier stages of the Bill some issues relating to CSDR settlement discipline which are perhaps inappropriate and, in some cases, highly damaging to the unique, quote-driven liquidity provision of the UK’s SME market. I hope that I have satisfied the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, that short selling in those markets is not damaging or dangerous to the UK economy. This would not apply to EU-based dealers, thus putting UK market makers at a competitive disadvantage because it would apply to them.

I hope the Minister can assure me that the Government will retain the power to have the flexibility needed to allow the UK to set its own rules for our financial services market, which is very different from the EU’s. I appreciate that this provision applies only in respect of in-flight rules but it sets the tone, and hereon in we will want to create our own bespoke laws, which may well diverge from the EU’s but will be more appropriate for our market. Rather than just hanging around hoping for some small alleviations in the circumstances of a no-deal Brexit, we really will need to act in a way that suits us in these areas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, I again thank noble Lords for their contributions and in particular my noble friend Lord Hodgson. Our debate on the previous grouping focused on what limitations would apply to the power under this Bill. This grouping looks at the complementary subject of reporting to ensure that the Government are as transparent as possible in the exercise of the power. The Bill, as introduced, placed a duty on the Government to publish a report annually on their exercise of the power. It was clear in Committee, however, that there was some room for improvement. I am again grateful and indebted to noble Lords from across the House for their work in Committee and in the period between Committee and Report.

I turn to Amendments 3, 4 and 5. The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, proposed that, where adjustments or omissions are needed when implementing the files, the Government should publish a report beforehand setting this out in detail to make sure that Parliament has sight of this, and can consider the merits of the proposals. Given the exceptional nature of the Bill and the powers being sought, it can only be right that the Government are clear with Parliament and the industry about how they intend to implement these files. The Government therefore propose introducing a new requirement, as set out in Amendments 3 and 4. These would ensure that, before laying any statutory instruments before Parliament under the affirmative procedure, the Government must first publish a document detailing the proposed text of the regulation with an accompanying report. The report would have to outline what, if anything, has been omitted from the original EU legislation, where there had been any adjustments to the original EU legislation, and provide justification for these adjustments.

As I noted in Committee, the three-month requirement could risk being too long. The essence of this Bill is the speed with which it will allow the UK to keep its regulation up to date and responsive to the uncertainty of a no-deal scenario. The amendment therefore proposes a one-month deadline. However, the Government will of course commit to publishing these documents earlier where possible.

On Amendment 5, in Committee my noble friend Lord Hodgson suggested a more regular reporting cycle than the yearly proposal in the Bill as introduced, and that these reports should set out the Government’s reasoning for why any adjustments might have been necessary. I again reassure noble Lords that it was always the Government’s intention to set out such a justification. This underpins the spirit behind the proposed new subsections (8) and (9) in Amendment 5. This requires the introduction of a more regular requirement for the Treasury to report—now every six months. It requires the Government to specify both how the power has been exercised over the previous six-month period and how they intend to exercise it over the coming six-month period.

This change has the further benefit of clearing up an inconsistency helpfully highlighted by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee in its 42nd report. Previously, the reporting deadlines were set out on calendar dates, whereas the power was to be commenced with reference to “exit day” as defined in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act. This amendment now tidies up the drafting to ensure that the reporting periods are set with reference to the commencement of the power itself. I again convey my thanks to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee.

Finally, proposed new subsection (9A) in Amendment 5 responds to the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, in Committee. Here we propose to introduce the same requirement for the financial regulators—the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority—to report on their exercise of any powers sub-delegated to them through the Bill. This follows the model established in the EU withdrawal Act. We agree that it is right that, as they will be implementing much of the legislation contained in this Bill, Parliament and the public should be kept informed of how their functions are being discharged.

I hope these amendments demonstrate the extent to which we believe it is vital that Parliament can properly assess and consider legislation taken forward under the Bill. These amendments on reporting, alongside clearer limitations of the power itself, substantially improve the safeguards that apply to the Bill. I hope these will provide the reassurances that I know the Committee sought.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for listening to everything said in Committee. There really is little else to say other than that he has taken on board three of my amendments. I am very pleased to see them there. I accept that he has cut down the timescale in the pre-legislative report, if I can call it that, to one month from three months because it might be necessary to do things more rapidly.

If I can pick out a theme from the several speeches I made before, it is that Parliament should not be surprised by what the Government intend to do and do. This suite of amendments, including the more frequent reporting suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, makes it very clear: we are told before and afterwards. In fact, we might be told before twice by the two reports—the generic one, if I might put it that way, and the precise one. We will also know where things are so that the diligent individual, possibly when dealing with things in the Moses Room in Grand Committee, will not have to search around wondering where things have or have not gone.

I thank the Minister. He has served me and us very well in this.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I add my thanks to my noble friend and his officials for Amendment 5, which in large measure answers the points I tried to raise in Committee. I am extremely grateful to him and to the Government.

An epochal event such as Brexit will obviously require a certain degree of statutory flexibility. That is why I support the principle of the Bill, but that does not mean that the powers under it should be exercised below the radar. I am therefore extremely grateful to my noble friend for having set the reporting periods, when he made it clear that it is not just a question of reporting: it is a question of why it is being used, as well as that it has been used. That is important to maintain confidence.

Interchange Fee (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Grand Committee

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, the Treasury has been undertaking a programme of legislation to ensure that the UK continues to have a functioning legislative and regulatory regime for financial services in the event that the UK leaves the EU without a deal or an implementation period. This statutory instrument will fix deficiencies in UK law relating to interchange fees applicable to card payments, as well as in rules for card schemes, issuers, acquirers and merchants.

The approach taken in this legislation aligns with that of other statutory instruments being laid under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act. While fundamentals of current financial services legislation will remain the same, amendments are required to ensure that it continues to function effectively. Every time someone makes a payment using their debit or credit card, interchange fees are paid from a merchant’s payment service provider—for example, their bank, which is referred to hereafter as an “acquirer”, to a card user’s payment service provider, referred to hereafter as the “issuer”.

Interchange fees are typically set by card schemes, for example Mastercard and Visa. The EU interchange fee regulation of 2015 introduced two main policy interventions. First, it imposes caps on the interchange fees where both the acquirer and the card issuer are located within the EEA. The caps do not apply where either the acquirer or the card issuer are located outside the EEA. The caps limit these interchange fees to 0.2% of the total value of the transaction for consumer debit cards, including prepaid cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards. It allows member states to set lower caps for domestic debit and credit transactions where both acquirer and issuer are in that country. Secondly, the EU interchange fee regulation sets rules on cards schemes, issuers, acquirers and merchants; these include requiring the separation of card schemes and processing entities, for example WorldPay.

Under a no-deal scenario, the UK would be outside the EEA; the scope of the EU interchange fee regulation would therefore no longer include the UK. As a result, the interchange fees set by card schemes would no longer be capped for payments that involve a UK acquirer and an EEA card issuer.

Higher interchange fees could in turn be passed on to UK businesses and consumers directly or indirectly. Without a change in scope of the UK legislation, caps would still apply to card payments involving an EEA acquirer and a UK card issuer. This would result in asymmetrical obligations on UK businesses.

This statutory instrument will make amendments to retained EU law related to the EU interchange fee regulation 2015 to ensure that it continues to operate effectively in the UK. First, it will reduce the scope of the EU interchange fee regulation in the UK from the EEA to the UK; the result is that the interchange fee caps will continue to apply to card payments where both the merchant’s acquirer and the card issuer are located in the UK. Card payments where either the merchant’s acquirer or the card issuer are located outside the UK but within the EEA will no longer be subject to the interchange fee caps. This statutory instrument mirrors the EU interchange fee regulation with regard to setting the level of the cap for domestic card transactions. It allows the Treasury to set lower caps on UK consumer debit and credit card transactions by making regulations exercisable by statutory instrument, subject to the negative procedure.

The statutory instrument also transfers powers from the European Commission to the Payment Systems Regulator to make regulatory technical standards regarding the requirements for separation of card schemes and their processing entities. This is in keeping with the Treasury’s general approach of delegating responsibility for technical standards to the appropriate UK regulator. The Treasury has engaged with the Payment Systems Regulator and industry in drafting the SI.

In November, the Treasury also published the instrument in the draft, along with an explanatory policy note to maximise transparency to Parliament and to the industry. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee requested further information on the costs that might result to businesses and consumers. As explained, and as is included in the updated Explanatory Memorandum that was relaid on 19 December, the most significant impact in this area is that interchange fee caps will no longer apply where either the merchant’s acquirer or the card issuer are located outside the UK but within the EEA. Any adjustment to interchange fees thereafter would be a commercial decision. Such impacts would be as a result of the UK leaving the EU, rather than as a result of an approach taken in this SI. The direct costs as a result of this SI are minimal.

In summary, therefore, this SI is necessary to ensure that the UK’s legislation and regulatory regime remains effective in the event that the UK leaves the EU without a deal or an implementation period. This will be to the benefit of UK businesses and consumers. I hope noble Lords will agree, and join me in supporting these regulations, which I commend to the Committee.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

I thank the Minister for his introduction. It is said that if you drown, your past life floats before your eyes. I feel a bit like that every time we meet to discuss these onshoring of SIs. Not only are we drowning in them, but there is rather a lot of my past life wrapped up in them. I got a double dose yesterday. It occurs to me that if I were to pick this up for the first time, as is the case for other noble Lords, I could not rely on the Explanatory Memorandum to help me out with the complete background and context of why there was such legislation in the first place. We know what the EU did and what it does in imposing the cap, but why it is done or why it was done is relevant to remarks that I will make on how the onshoring has been done.

Placing a cap on card payment interchange fees was a hotly contested debate at the time, not for great party-political differences, but by the payment service providers, who did not want a cap on their profits or to have to be transparent about the breakdown of costs. I recall that it was incredibly difficult to get a true handle on what was or was not reasonable as a cap, because the lobbying was so confusing and lacking in transparent facts. If I further recall correctly, the UK Government were quite sensitive to the lobbying and were not among the most hawkish when it came to fixing the cap. In Parliament we harboured rather greater suspicions about the credit card companies. What was known was that EU consumers paid billions in interchange fees, because the costs, of course, are passed on to the goods. It was €9 billion in 2011. There had been competition investigations by national competition authorities and the Commission, which took proceedings against Mastercard and Visa.

The key problem was that cardholders, who are generally unaware of interchange fees, or at least their size, are encouraged to use cards that generated higher fees; at the same time the card companies competed to attract issuing banks by offering them the higher interchange fees. Those mechanisms operate to drive fees up rather than drive them down. As a consequence, that caused the disappearance of some of the cheaper cards, and the UK was among the countries that suffered—so did the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and Ireland.

On the receiving end of the fees, the merchants and consumers had no power of redress on the competitive balance, even though the cost of the interchange fees was ultimately borne by them. So market intervention was needed, and that, in the end, resulted in the agreement of these caps. The measure was copied by other countries because there are benefits to that regulation, even in an individual territory.

There was an added cross-border dimension in the EU because it enabled banks from other countries that offered lower fees to come in and compete. Prior to the legislation, card schemes were able to apply rules to prevent retailers using better-priced schemes from other countries. The difference could be significant. Interchange fees varied from 0.1% to 1.5% in 2014, prior to the cap. The UK was neither one of the worst nor one of the best. From the largest providers, debit card rates were of the order of 0.24%, and credit card rates were 0.9%. The new caps of 0.2% and 0.3% were clearly an improvement, and applied to cross-border transactions within the EEA as well as domestic ones, as has been explained.

I fully understand the logic of how the onshoring has been done, in that the UK and EEA will be third countries to one another, and the Explanatory Memorandum makes it clear that cross-border transactions with the EEA will no longer be capped. That comes from the third-country provisions of the regulation and presumably how the UK will be treated by the EU. I have no doubt that, where relieved from an obligation, credit card companies will seize the opportunity of making more profit.

In particular, I draw attention to paragraph 12.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum:

“It is technically possible that, in this instrument, the UK could mandate interchange fee caps that apply to the interchange fees that UK card issuers would be permitted to charge to international transactions. However, this would place asymmetrical obligations on UK businesses vis-à-vis third countries, whereas the current situation provides symmetry with EEA countries. The default onshoring approach to fixing deficiencies relating to the scope, is therefore to reduce the scope of the regulations to UK-only, rather than extending the scope worldwide”.


There might well have been other ways of dealing with it. I have seen a lot of these onshoring SIs now, not just from the Treasury and other departments, and sometimes symmetry is aimed at—sometimes not. Sometimes the EEA is put in the third-country box and sometimes not. Sometimes a continuing, although asymmetrical, arrangement is used. We have examples of that in the next batch of SIs on funds. We have already had it with regard to occupational pension funds.

I greatly regret the choice that the Treasury has made. It has given in to saying we will let card issuers make more profit. What is the justification beyond defaulting to symmetry? If I go on holiday and use my UK cards, will I find that merchants start to add on surcharges? Will I find that my UK cards might not be accepted? Was there really the need to aim for symmetry? If the fees on the cards are increased, those are the kinds of consequences that we saw before we had PSD1 and PSD2, the payment services directives. I cannot find a reason why the credit card companies should be protected rather than the UK consumer. Those companies are being given a windfall.

Of paragraphs 12.2 and 12.5—I think they were added in addition due to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee—the former says:

“Businesses may potentially face more significant costs as a result of the scope of the regulations”,


but that is going to rely on,

“commercial decisions taken by card schemes”.

Paragraph 12.5 addresses the effect on the consumer—it is all going to result from,

“the commercial decisions of businesses to adjust interchange fees, as opposed to the onshoring approach taken in this instrument”.

But the onshoring approach could have been taken as one to protect the consumer rather than to give the credit card companies their head. Would it not have been better to try to maintain the current state and, then, if for some reason it was not working, to give the Treasury the power to make a change?

I would like a little more information from the Minister about what efforts were made to see whether costs for the UK end could be properly pinned down. Just because the EU end can become a rip-off does not mean that the same practice should be condoned at the UK end. I do not count it as a competitive disadvantage to not be able to rip off customers. After Brexit, the issuers in the UK will no longer be in direct competition with the issuers in the EU. To say that they are at a competitive disadvantage—I think that is what “asymmetric obligations” is meant to imply—does not hold. All that is being allowed is a potential rip off, and what is the logic of that?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

I do not think the noble and learned Lord has misunderstood it. He makes a fair point as to how this will operate. The clarification I offered in my previous comments is that the withdrawal agreement Bill, which we are talking about, will delay the need to implement the provisions and allow them to be amended or repealed. It effectively gives a choice as to how these SIs would be handled. This instrument would not be required or in force during the implementation period. In that event, current EU law would continue to apply. I think it was on that point that the noble and learned Lord sought an on-the-record response.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, gave a helpful analysis of the situation with regard to why we did not cap interchange fees for UK card issuers. At the moment, the interchange fee regulations maintain symmetry for payment service providers. If HM Treasury applied the interchange fee caps vis-à-vis the EEA without corresponding commitments from the EEA, that would constitute a policy change. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, has been consistently assiduous throughout our engagements on these matters in ensuring that there should not be—

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

I am not quite sure that I buy that line. I can use the examples of the regulations we are about to debate, or the ones on occupational pensions. There, funds contain UK assets and EEA assets. When they are onshored, the symmetrical position and the one that we might expect the EEA to take is to narrow down the fund content: just to the UK for the UK and the continuing EEA for the EEA. That was what was done for occupational pensions, but then the point was made that that requires a lot of divesting of assets for funds—it is far better to have diversity—and that is generally not good for investors or for pensions. The occupational pensions regulations were changed so that the diversity of assets could remain. That is the proposal with the regulations we are about to debate on the subgroup of funds—the venture capital and social entrepreneurship regulations.

At the same time, third countries are still treated differently, so there is not a uniform choice that we go it alone or go down the third country route. There are occasions when this midway has been chosen to continue to stick within the greater EEA area. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, was here yesterday when we discussed this regarding parallel imports. He might have been thinking about what would be coming later, but this choice between symmetry and asymmetry, and the fact that we now have divided up into three potential territories—UK only, UK plus EEA and third country—exists. There are precedents. I am afraid that I do not think that the arguments the officials have presented the noble Lord with stand up to scrutiny.

[Lord Bates]

I certainly recall every word of the four glorious hours we spent waiting to debate these instruments in Grand Committee yesterday. I also remember the eloquence of the noble Baroness’s exposition on patents, drawn from her experience as, I believe, a patent attorney in Europe.

I can only repeat that what we are doing here might not be satisfactory to the noble Baroness. She has highlighted—it is to the benefit of the Committee that she has done so—that there is a choice here. She is making the argument that there is a choice. Our view, in consultation with the industry and the Payment Systems Regulator, is that the way we have presented this best reflects the way we have onshored this approach, remaining consistent with the commitments and undertakings given in Section 8 of the withdrawal Act. I will certainly take back to my friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury the point the noble Baroness has made. If she will allow me, I will write to her with some more details as to why that policy choice was taken. It is a choice that is there and the one used in the statutory instrument. I commend it to the Committee.

Alternative Investment Fund Managers (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Grand Committee

To summarise, the Government believe that these SIs are needed to ensure that the regulatory regime for investment funds and their managers will work effectively in the UK if it leaves the EU without a deal or an implementation period, and to ensure continuity for the UK customers, the funds and their managers that they serve. I hope colleagues will join me in supporting these regulations and I commend them to the Committee.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

Once again, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for his explanations. I declare my interest as a director of the London Stock Exchange PLC as some of these provisions could cover funds that might list on the exchange, although nothing I say is to do with the London Stock Exchange.

The AIFMD was a controversial piece of legislation. It was improved greatly during its long passage through the European Parliament and through trilaogues with the Council and the Commission—I think it took us more than 20 trilaogue meetings, which is a large number. I used up every ounce of my patience and innovation to keep it going until everything was in an acceptable place.

The directive started life as a way of regulating hedge funds, which were in the firing line after the financial crisis for their perceived role in the eurozone sovereign debt crisis and for selling unsuitable investments to retail investors—particularly in France which, unlike the UK, did not have any retail consumer protections in place. It was expanded to cover asset stripping. There are anecdotes around why that happened but I will not go into them here—and as I have not written my memoirs, noble Lords will not get to know them. Some hedge fund managers congratulated me on the fact that the legislation ended up in an acceptable place with nothing silly, but many resented moving from an unregulated space into a regulated space and, in the words of one manager, “having to spend time reporting things instead of just earning money”. I am afraid that, as a consequence, the legislation became a recruiting sergeant for the Brexit cause, with funds to boot. That is its sad legacy. That little bit of history augments what has already been said.

Further arrangements were introduced for the specific funds we are also talking about: social entrepreneurship funds and venture capital funds. I considered those introductions very useful, not just in their own right but because it represented the first breakthrough where some people recognised that AIFs could be good; they were usually considered to be at the bad end of the spectrum.

I have no comments on the way in which the onshoring has been done in so far as it follows the kind of path we have seen before, with temporary permissions in place until transfer to the domestic regime—in this case, the UK national private placement regime—takes place. I do, however, have a couple of questions, and I gave notice to the Treasury of the first one.

I believe that, in his introduction, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, covered the reasons why there has been a change to the private placement regime’s reporting requirements. The reasoning, which I understand fully, is that EEA UCITs become AIFs and therefore slot into a regime meant to cover the sort of funds used by only professional investors, whereas it has protections that correspond to the retail case from the EEA UCITs. That was given as a reason for changing the reporting requirements for those under the national private placement regime.

However, I do not understand what power the Government are using for that proportionality, and here I refer to what is said in paragraph 7.10 of the Explanatory Memorandum concerning Regulation 10(9)e. Is it a continuation of the withdrawal Act powers or are the Government using another form of empowerment? I did not perceive the withdrawal Act as giving powers to amend the national private placement regime, but I may have missed something in the logic. I hope that there is an answer there; it is quite likely that there is, which is why I gave notice of my question. Paragraph 7.10 also references the “reporting requirements for funds” recognised as retail funds under Section 272 of FSMA. It is true that they are less risky, so less reporting is needed, but where has the power to amend the private placement regime come from? Has it come from FSMA? That may be possible. If so, that should be said. I decided not to spend yet another weekend trying to work out where it came from, but to ask the question instead.

My second question concerns asset stripping. The asset stripping provisions have been contracted to apply only to UK companies. Does that mean that EU funds that are allowed to continue in the UK under the temporary regime can come here to asset-strip EU companies that they acquire? Are we going to get ourselves a bad reputation—“Come to London and we will strip your EU assets”—or are they covered by the built-in requirement of their home member state? Could they separately acquire something that is somehow ring-fenced in the UK? When they are converted to the UK national regime, will it still have all the asset stripping protections? It may not be the place to correct that here but, on a point of information, will our NPPR have UK asset-stripping protections? That was a novel aspect that was introduced into the AIFMD.

I will move on to venture capital and social entrepreneurship funds. When they were proposed, they were said not to be attracting much interest in the UK; people said that we did not need this kind of thing and we had all the funds we needed. I wonder therefore whether there are any figures for the volume of assets under management or sold in the UK using this heading.

We come now to the interesting point I have already mentioned: symmetry and continuity of assets under management. This is an instance of where we are treating the EEA preferentially and not as a third country, so that these funds can still have EEA assets within them, which I fully understand—you would not want to have to rapidly divest assets. But when they were constructed, preferential bias was built in to try to help the EU and EEA companies. Will there be a review of that in the fullness of time, for example to restore in some way the benefit of the UK footprint rather than an EEA footprint? What has been done is sensible in the immediate, but it would be interesting to know the longer-term view, partly because the logic of coming under the same jurisprudence no longer holds. The other side of that is: why not open up so that they can have all funds, including third countries, in them? How are we going to deal with that?

That is probably all that I need to say. My question is, what is the justification? The choice was between three options and the continuity option has been chosen. But where are we going to jump to next? Are we going to shrink back to the UK or are we going to open up to third countries?

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for presenting these instruments. I am sorry to sound like a broken record but I want to start with my concerns about the impact assessment. The Explanatory Memorandum says:

“A full Impact Assessment will be published alongside the Explanatory Memorandum on the legislation.gov.uk website, when an opinion from the Regulatory Policy Committee has been received”.


Is the Minister going to tell me that it is also de minimis or is this different from the last one? I had hoped that there would be an impact assessment, because I have absolutely no idea of the scale that we are talking about: I do not know whether we are talking about millions, billions or semi-trillions floating around. I would have found an impact assessment useful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

I hear what the noble Lord says. On that particular point, I was referring to the general objective of the onshoring process in which we are engaged. This is to effectively onshore the current rule book to allow for no or limited disruption to UK firms—and, most importantly, their customers and clients—in the unlikely event of no deal. I accepted that point on the previous SI. I will reflect on the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, about how the choice will be applied in future—how it will be arrived at—and I shall copy them in on my letter.

The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked me to clarify how the passporting regime will work for third countries post-Brexit. The passporting regime between the UK and the EU will cease in a no-deal scenario. There is a third-country passport, which is currently not in force. The SI transfers to the Treasury the Commission’s function of appointing the day when this passport comes into effect. If in force, the third-country passport can be used to allow third-country fund managers to be authorised to manage and market funds in the UK.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, asked about opening up to third countries in the future, which is a pertinent question. This instrument deals only with the inoperability that comes with withdrawal from the EU in the event of no deal. However, the national private placement regime is a functioning regime for any third country to take advantage of.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

I understand fully that to some extent we do not need a third-country passport because our national private placement regime is sufficient to do almost the same job. But in my question I was also talking about the assets that the venture capital funds and social entrepreneur funds are allowed to hold. Would those be opened up and be able to have third-country assets in the fullness of time? I do not mind being written to about that.

[Lord Bates]

We may have to do that but I will go as far as I can with the information which I have. There is some more information which I can convey to the noble Baroness and the Committee. The Government recognise that the alternative investment fund managers regime and the UCITS regime aimed at retail funds do not intertwine perfectly. This is why we have made fixes, where possible, within the confines of the EU withdrawal Act.

Section 272, which the noble Baroness referred to, is to ensure that EEA retail funds are treated as any other third-country funds, in keeping with the UK’s obligations under the World Trade Organization rules in a no-deal situation. It is not possible for UCITS to buy or build a controlling stake in the securities of a company or to hold private equity interests. The small number of non-UCITS recognised under Section 272 are all subject to UK-equivalent rules for retail funds on eligibility of assets, borrowing and risk spreading. I undertake to reread the record of this debate and ensure that the noble Baroness’s point is addressed directly, if that did not quite cover it.

The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked about exit day. Is it 29 March and how will this instrument be switched off if there is a deal? Exit day is defined in the EU withdrawal Act as 29 March 2019. As I said in the previous debate, the withdrawal agreement Bill will contain provision to change the commencement date of the SI in the event of a deal.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, and the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, asked about the volume of assets under management for these various fund categories. At the moment, the numbers we are referring to are fairly small. They combine fewer than 50 European venture capital funds and European social entrepreneurship funds in the UK, based on FCA estimates. But as a result of these changes and the temporary permissions regimes, we may get greater visibility of them. I share her desire regarding venture capital, which of course provides seed corn to many small and medium-sized enterprises that will be vital to our economic future, and regarding the importance of social entrepreneurship funds. I know that many departments across government are looking at those funds as a way to implement the sustainable development goals and leveraging private sector capital to meet those objectives.

I think that covers most of the points raised by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. Again, I thank them for their assiduousness in looking through these regulations. I also recognise and thank the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for its work, which was extremely helpful in this regard, and I commend these instruments to the Committee.

Financial Services (Implementation of Legislation) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th January 2019 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 3, leave out “or” and insert “and”

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, for the purposes of the Committee stage of this Bill, I declare my interest as in the register as a director of the London Stock Exchange plc.

This Bill, as was elaborated at Second Reading, is intended to provide a way to land so-called in-flight legislation. However, as many noble Lords also observed during Second Reading, the scope for amendment of that legislation is wide and not limited to the type of onshoring provisions of the withdrawal Act. Indeed, there is no promise of onshoring at all. This point is noted by the Delegated Powers Committee in paragraph 17 of its report on this Bill. The fact is that there is just a wide power to make legislation related to any of the provisions in any of the legislation in subsection (2) or specified in the list in the Schedule. There are no provisions defining how close it must be to that legislation, and the power is not anchored only to withdrawal from the EU.

We should not lose sight of the fact that the mechanism is an alternative to primary legislation. Although the power is time-limited, I do not consider that that is sufficient control to replace primary legislation entirely. It cannot be left open for the Government to cherry pick, to diminish, to add or to do things that depart from expectation, in terms both of the policy in the EU instruments that the power covers and the policy that has been laid out by government with regard to relations with the EU after Brexit.

The doubt starts right at the opening words, which state:

“The Treasury may by regulations make provision … corresponding, or similar, to … any of the provisions, of any specified EU financial services legislation”.


The use of “or” clearly implies that the regulation may make provisions that are corresponding but not similar. A simple suggestion may be to make a penalty for a failure in a corresponding position, but not the same penalty. So, too, could it be the other way round: a provision may be similar but not corresponding. A penalty may be moved to somewhere else or attached to a different provision. We often talk in particular about criminal penalties, when we are equalising them out between different types of provisions.

Amendment 1 would replace “or” with “and” so that it said “corresponding and similar”, thus making the objective clear: it corresponds to a particular EU provision and it is in similar terms. That seems to be a good and clear start to the Bill rather than the imprecise start that it currently has.

On its own, the amendment would not solve all the problems, including the Government’s plea for some flexibility. In other amendments in later groups, I probe how that might be done. Other noble Lords have amendments in this group which suggest further limitations on power. As it has fallen to me to speak first, I shall briefly comment on them

Amendment 3, tabled by my noble friend Lord Sharkey, makes a good point about not changing the primary purpose of the EU legislation, and it could sit alongside my Amendment 1 as well as standing alone. Amendment 5, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, and others, would limit the provisions to the circumstances of withdrawal from the EU. I am interested in the debate around that point. How far would the Government intend to stretch the term,

“adjustments in connection with the withdrawal”?

What other form of amendment not connected to withdrawal might they be contemplating?

Amendment 7, by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, progresses the limitation to reflecting the UK position outside the EU. In later groups, I have put forward some probing amendments that would limit the scope of amendment in other ways but which are a little more permissive, so, for now, I reserve my own position on Amendments 5 and 7 save to say that, if it is not feasible to construct suitably restrained flexibility, limitations of the kind set out in Amendments 5 and 7 would have to become the default position. I beg to move.

[Lord Sharkey (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 3. At Second Reading, there was much discussion of the wide powers that the Bill gives to the Treasury via secondary legislation. All the amendments in this group deal with that issue.

Clause 1 contains clear Henry VIII powers. It allows the Treasury to make policy and new laws entirely by means of statutory instrument. It even allows such new laws to be wholly unrelated to the UK’s exit from the EU. Unusually, it allows these new laws on to the statute book without any parent primary legislation. There will be no parent Acts for these new laws: no context, no detailed parliamentary discussion and no effective parliamentary scrutiny.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

I hear what the noble Lord and the Committee have said. That is what a Committee stage is for: it is for the Government to listen to what noble Lords have to say. I am grateful for what they have said, and I undertake to take it back, reflect on it and discuss it with colleagues ahead of Report. In the meantime, if the noble Baroness is happy to withdraw her amendment, I shall be grateful.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his replies. Part of his early response sounded quite encouraging when he said that things would not move outside the bounds of the original EU legislation, but it got a bit worse later on when he said this meant that things could still be domesticated or removed to match the peculiarities of the UK financial markets, which basically means not doing it if we do not feel like doing it. That is certainly how it was presented, interpreted and ended up in the EU when I was in charge of putting through a lot of this legislation.

With regard to my own amendment, I think he has said that “corresponding” is tight, in that the provision has to be identical in all respects. But he went on to say that this is one of two definitions that give wider latitude; “similar” was somehow a looser term but did not have that same latitude. He made the point that trying to satisfy two different legal criteria can be confusing, and I would side with that view. He also said, I think, that one of the terms was meant to apply to one category of the legislation and the other, looser term—whichever that turns out to be—applied to the other.

If I understood correctly, he said that the list that appears in subsection (2)—which is the finished though not yet active legislation: there are no changes, it is all done and we know what it says—would be subject to the tighter of the definitions, which is possibly “corresponding”. Those in the annex, which have not been finished and possibly might not be finished until after we have left—so we will not be involved in the last tweaks—may need to be tweaked more and will be subject to the term “similar”. This starts an interesting discussion, which we can continue when we talk on other groups, of whether we should completely separate out how we deal with the legislation that we already know about and can already analyse regarding whether it works for the UK markets, as opposed to where things are not definite and one needs more reservations. I push that out as a point.

Other amendments, particularly Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, would also solve some points, as they go back to the question of the “primary purposes”. The key anxiety is that this Bill enables legislation to be made through a secondary method which is incapable of having scrutiny and will not necessarily have had scrutiny even at the European level by way of the adjustments, and there is no way to amend it. It could depart from the purpose, no matter what is said, because the Bill does not actually say there is to be no departure from the purpose. If you put in Amendment 3, or some other amendments that we will come to later, then you can tie it down and make clear where you will depart and where you cannot do so.

Let us be clear that one of the elephants in the room is whether we will implement the legislation at all. There is nothing compelling this. One can cherry pick it—we will come on to that in the next group of amendments—but there is nothing that says it will be onshored, so one could simply not have it at all. It is absolutely clear if you look at the first articles in subsection (2)(a),

“Articles 6 and 7 of the Central Securities Depositories Regulation”—

we know what the issue is there. I am sure there are people in this Chamber right now who could debate the benefits and otherwise of those particular articles. It was thought that the EU might not be able to make the technical standards, or that they would somehow be withdrawn. But no, the technical standards have been made; we know what they are and the likelihood that they will become active in 2020. The question could be put now: are we going to have it, or are we not? If we are not going to have it, should that be at the whim of the Treasury? This has significant repercussions on all kinds of other parts of the market where we may or not be deemed to have equivalence. We might as well discuss this now. It should not be someone sitting in an office and saying, “Well that can go and damn the consequences”.

We have a lot more to discuss around this as we go into the next groups but for the time being I beg leave—

[Lord Adonis]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, I just want to say that all the points she has made, and made extremely well, seem to me to be met by my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham’s excellent Amendment 7. Most of the problems the Minister has encountered could be solved by him simply accepting it, because what Amendment 7 says is that:

“Regulations made under subsection (1) shall be limited to preventing, remedying or mitigating deficiencies in retained EU law”.


I have not yet heard a good argument put before the Committee, least of all by the Minister, for why we should not accept that amendment. The Minister says he wishes to discuss it further; I am not exactly sure what there is further to discuss, because unless my noble friend Lord Davies or the noble Baroness resile from this amendment, it is a very clear-cut position of principle, which seems to me to be fundamental to the maintenance of our proper parliamentary procedures.

So would the noble Baroness agree that the right position is for the Liberal Democrats and my noble friends to stick resolutely by Amendment 7, and unless the Minister is prepared to meet us on that, we should simply vote on that and seek to carry it, I hope with support across the House, because it is fundamental to the operation of parliamentary sovereignty? On Report, we should not get involved in a long technical discussion about how much additional power we might grant the Minister simply because he has put a proposal on the table in the first instance which is straightforwardly outrageous.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. He will recall that I reserved my position on that amendment but said that I thought it is the default if we cannot find something workable that gives more flexibility to the Government. I will come on to why there may be a case for flexibility in the next group, where I have a set of amendments related to it, but I can give noble Lords a preview in that I think it is quite difficult to define what that flexibility should be, and so it is going to take a lot of work to better Amendment 7. What the noble Lord suggests as the common position might well come, but we have a duty to explore further. There is more to mine away at within this Bill, and so I will not give an absolute yes to that question. Furthermore, there may be others within the group who want to consider the points. With that, in order that we can move on, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

2: Clause 1, page 1, line 4, leave out “, or any of the provisions,”

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, as I explained, I have three amendments in this group. They fit together as a set, but Amendment 2 can also be a useful standalone provision.

Amendment 2 would delete the words “or any of the provisions” from line 4. On its own, that amendment is intended to prevent the cherry picking of favourite bits of the legislation. Taken to its extreme, such cherry picking would even enable the cherry picking of revocations of prior legislation—such revocations might appear in the schedule because they are amendments to other pieces of legislation. So you might be able to enact them without any kind of replacement.

More generally, EU legislation is interwoven with checks and balances, and if some are left out, the nature of the legislation can be changed or rendered ineffective, for example if penalties are taken out or time limits changed. The DPRRC makes a similar point in its paragraph 17, which says that,

“the overall effect of the legislation might vary quite substantially depending on which provisions are implemented and which … are not”.

Whether on its own or in combination with other amendments, it would be a useful amendment to rule out the prospect of simply cherry picking.

Amendment 4 is a linguistic amendment that links to Amendment 6. It might not actually be necessary, but I tabled it to deal with the kind of omissions that might be necessary—for example, taking out things that are not relevant to the UK. An obvious one would be something to do with monetary union, which is not relevant to us. The amendment’s purpose is to clarify that “adjustments”—that nebulous word; maybe we need something else—includes omissions. Then, whether it is an adjustment, change, omission or whatever we want to call it, all become subject to the same controls I would put in with Amendment 6 and elsewhere. This does not work if you try to do it using the wording appearing earlier in the clause. It looks a bit bizarre to take out the possibility of omissions in one place and put it in somewhere else, but this is just to ensure that one could establish that the conditions imposed apply to all of it. At the time of drafting I thought it clearer to reference “omissions” than “provisions not provided for” or something of that nature.

The more substantive Amendment 6 states that any omission or adjustment made under subsection (1) that is not subject to similar conditions as those in the withdrawal Act—that could be tightened up to refer to a particular provision of that Act—and does not fall under that kind of provision is,

“only to be considered appropriate if the Treasury has at least three months previously laid before Parliament a report on the policy and reasons for omission or potential omission”.

Here I am, as I said I would try to do, crafting something using the ideas of the reports in subsections (8) and (9) so that, if the Treasury comes forward with some proposal, Parliament is not surprised by it because it has been laid out and possibly even debated and understood.

That would be very helpful, but, having put forward this suggestion as to making flexibility, I came to the conclusion that I do not think that that on its own is sufficient. It still gives far too wide a leeway for change because the kind of reporting we get when statutory instruments to do with EU exit are brought before us—the Minister will know that we spend hours on them in this Chamber and in Grand Committee—is a bit perfunctory. Anyway, even if they are reported, it does not mean that they can be stopped. Maybe I have not got this right. My point is that one still needs to have some other overarching provision that stops things going too far, which might come back to Amendment 7, in which case all these other ones would not be necessary, to my noble friend Lord Sharkey’s Amendment 3 or, when we get to the next group, to my Amendment 8.

I am trying to find a way to give the Government the possibility for flexibility, because I know as well as anybody else what EU legislation could look like in the absence of a strong input from the UK. I have said before that I know what it would look like if I had not been there. I concede that we have to have some defences. If the defence is not to be primary legislation, to go through it all again—and I am very conscious of the volume of that—then there need to be some guidelines. It cannot be just a simple free-for-all. We need to know what is going on, and the reporting has a huge input there, but we have to be able to say no if the departures are substantive. I beg to move.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I understand what the noble Baroness is seeking to do: to tease out from the Government whether they are prepared to agree to new reporting requirements, which would be helpful. There is nothing in the new reporting requirements which I think is objectionable. On the contrary, the more the Government are prepared to explain their policy to Parliament, the better. I know the noble Baroness said she and her colleagues are considering what their stance will be when it comes to Report. Can I recommend Amendment 7 in the name of my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham? It is significantly superior in this respect. It makes a clear distinction of principle between Orders in Council which are,

“limited to preventing, remedying or mitigating deficiencies in retained EU law”,

and, because they are so limited, an Order in Council procedure is justifiable; and changes to the law that go beyond that, and which, as a matter of principle, should be subjected to the primary legislation procedure. The Liberal Democrats do not want to give decree-making powers to the Government, so I cannot see an argument for not subjecting substantive changes in the law that go beyond,

“preventing, remedying or mitigating deficiencies in retained EU law”,

to primary legislation, as my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham sets out in his Amendment 7. I encourage the noble Baroness and the Liberal Democrats to be true to their liberal principles and not to give dictatorial powers to the Government, and to support my noble friend’s Amendment 7.

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[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

I thank the Minister for his response. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, pointed out, the meat, if you like, in this group of amendments is in Amendment 6 and some mechanism of having reports to Parliament so that we are not surprised by what is going on. I think that that means more than just laying a finished instrument. When I was drafting it, I was looking more at the reports that are required by subsections (8) and (9). The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has tabled some amendments and I signed some of them because I think that good work can be done on the issue of reports. Perhaps my Amendment 6 ideas will go into that pot.

I think we are getting to a situation where some statutory instruments will be able to go through because there will not be significant changes or the sorts of changes that would lead to a loss of equivalence or a change of purpose or however we define it. But there will be some others, if there has been an unsatisfactory conclusion to some of this in-flight legislation, where the changes will be larger, and for which therefore the process that uses secondary legislation may not be appropriate, so one will have to fall back on primary legislation. That does not mean that that will be the destination for all of them, because they will not necessarily all be unsatisfactory. There will be an incentive, perhaps, to stay aligned and do some, but the fact that one or two might require primary legislation is not something that can be run away from.

I will just put in a plug for Amendment 2, the anti-cherry-picking point that you cannot pick and choose between the provisions; it should be on a whole basis. If we were to pursue Amendment 7 as the mainstream amendment, I would suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the Labour Front Bench that something like Amendment 2 would perhaps slot in quite well, if it is not inherently covered by the wording, which I would have to analyse further.

I think we are slowly making progress, but my conclusion is that everything is still too wide, so we need to move on to the other groups. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

8: Clause 1, page 1, line 11, at end insert—
“( ) But no adjustment may be made under subsection (1)(b) that jeopardises potential equivalence with the EU.”

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[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, this amendment is a simple, overarching provision that says that no adjustment may be made,

“that jeopardises potential equivalence with the EU”.

This goes to the heart of what is allowable under a statutory instrument and what is not. It seems to me that it is one thing to seek short-cut arrangements—if I might call them that—to land in-flight legislation without needing primary legislation but quite a different matter to then land that legislation at a destination that is very different from the one that was expected. This is especially the case for legislation under subsection (2), which is no longer under negotiation but which has in fact landed, even if it is not yet operational.

It is worth pointing out that everything the Government have said about Brexit, under whatever type of Brexit, is to try to obtain or retain equivalence—that is the expectation. It may be that equivalence does not work out; it might be due to things that the EU does which become problems for UK markets—and, as I said, I know pretty well how that might happen—or it might just be that the EU Commission delays or decides not to make an equivalence finding because it does not see it as in its interest. After all, it is EU Commission policy to make equivalence decisions only when the EU needs them—although it tends to find out in the end that it does need them. I know full well what an infuriating process equivalence can be, as I have played my part both in making sure that it gets into the legislation in the first place and then pressing EU officials to get on with it.

However, despite all those difficulties around equivalence and whether we will have it or not, that will not be decided overnight—even, if I may say so, in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Thus to abandon notions of equivalence, even at any time within two years of Brexit, would be a big step and a decision that should come before Parliament in primary legislation. I do not say that it should not happen, but it is a big departure. I do not remember that anybody’s manifesto said that they would abandon equivalence willy-nilly. Everything that has been said on every occasion, on everything to do with the Brexit negotiations, has been to try to get something better than equivalence, so it would be a big departure to set it aside. This is where the dividing line comes, and this would be the gatekeeper of those things that you do: “It’s okay—you’re keeping equivalence. No; you can’t do it this way if you want to break away from equivalence”.

The truth is that we have already given regulators sufficient leeway that they could make rules that led to an abandonment of equivalence by them not matching EU delegated Acts legislation. The way we have set it up, that has been given to the regulators. However, I do not think that our regulators would tend to go down that track—and if they did, I suspect that it would feature prominently in their consultations. I regret that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is not in his place, because I commend his amendment that we will come to later on, in which he suggests that some reporting from the Bank of England should be included. Possibly, if we are to have these reports that tell us what is going on across the piece, it would be a good idea to include in that what the FCA is doing, whether that is done through the FCA having a section of the report or through the Treasury dealing on its behalf with that aspect of the report that it told us about.

As I have already indicated, we know that there are concerns about certain bits or pieces of legislation, but we have to bear in mind that abandonment or significant alteration of any policy element of what is essentially EU primary legislation may well remove the hope of equivalence for part of the market, or indeed for other parts or entities that are not necessarily the direct beneficiaries of those adjustments. I could construct an argument around the changing of the buy-in regime. If that was dropped, it could have ramifications for equivalences in many other places, and that matter is already weighing on the consciences of those who are having to think about which way they would want to push that debate.

As I said, the business about what we do with equivalence needs a great deal more thought. As my noble friend Lady Kramer said, we cannot let it go by default of not doing something or by rushing something through in a statutory instrument that we cannot amend, knowing that it might lead to a loss of equivalence. I beg to move.

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, the hope is that if everything were sensible, the amendment would be appropriate and powerful. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, pointed out, it is possible that the EU may go down paths of regulation that are not very sensible. In that situation, given that the market for the UK’s financial services industry is not just Europe, it may not be practical for the UK to use and follow equivalence. Indeed, there may need to be changes to the benefit of the industry other than vis-à-vis a Europe that has gone off the rails with its regulations.

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[Lord Bates]

To go back to first principles, I am saying that the power in this Bill is not in effect to make policy—rather, it is the ability to produce secondary legislation that has a policy content to it and which would then be subject to scrutiny in this House. That power is being put in place for an extraordinary set of circumstances—I think we all agree that these are extraordinary circumstances and in fact I should underscore that we hope that these powers will not be required to be acted upon, because there will be a deal and we will continue to have access to the market in financial services across the EU. That is our aim, but we are preparing for all eventualities.

The noble Baroness will be aware that equivalence determinations are autonomous decisions with the EU and, in turn, the UK retaining autonomy for determining if a foreign jurisdiction has equivalent standards and supervision. The EU takes a varied approach to assessments of equivalence, tailoring its approach to individual regimes with regard to how the assessment is conducted. The Commission itself has stated:

“It is the equivalence of regulatory and supervisory results that is being assessed, not a word-for-word sameness of legal texts”.


Indeed, for a recent example, one need to look only at the EU’s statements on equivalence in a no-deal scenario. Within these, the EU has been clear that equivalence decisions of the UK will be made where justified in the interest of the Union and its member states, with time limits and conditions to their decisions where appropriate. As such, it is very difficult to judge what the EU will take into account in its future assessments and how its autonomous third-country regime will evolve. Such an approach, plus the breadth and variety of considerations that form part of equivalence determinations, from the rules themselves to supervisory approaches, means that it would be very difficult to determine what effect, if any, a change or adjustment that the UK makes to our laws might have on a future equivalence determination in a given area, given that these are autonomous decisions taken by the EU. It is therefore difficult to see how the test set out in this amendment could be met.

Let me reiterate the importance of, in the case of a no-deal situation, retaining the ability to adjust our legislation so that it best serves the aims and objectives of the UK once we have left the EU, as my noble friend Lord Flight has identified. It is crucial to ensure that we can bring into force pieces of legislation in a way that works best for the interests of UK markets. The Government are also committed to doing this as transparently as possible, which is why we have set out the strict reporting requirements to which I know we will return on Report. In the light of that, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

I thank the Minister for his response. I shall deal first with the point that this might be legislation that will never need to be implemented. But the fact is that something like this will probably be needed when we get to the next cliff edge, and in any event by passing this Bill, we will also set a precedent for what might then follow in subsequent legislation. You cannot get some dodgy things through on the basis of reasoning, “Oh, we might never need it”. We know only too well the effect of having let something slip through once. I can assure the Committee that that is not something I had a reputation for in Europe and I would not allow it here if I had anything to do with it.

Like my noble friend Lady Kramer, I fully accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Flight, that the legislation might not be “sensible” when looked at from the UK perspective. This is what is meant by not being able to fit in with the specificities of the UK. However, the trouble is that that is a very vague description. We would need far more of an indication of what is meant by that to allow it to be any kind of gatekeeper. I think that the point about equivalence is fundamental and it can be a gatekeeper. It is probably completely wrong not to contemplate having an equivalence Bill which actually lays out in more detail the sort of tests that would be applied. Looking further into the distance of how we deal with financial services legislation, we are not going to bring to the Floor of this House all the detail set out in the regulations and directives that I had to negotiate. The majority of that will no doubt be passed off to the Treasury and the regulators in some way that will not concern us. I am not sure that I agree with that, but I can see the writing on the wall. However, something big such as whether we want to stay aligned or whether we think that it has progressed too far—it is too uncertain, we cannot deal with this kind of uncertainty, and what are the tests?—could well be put into legislation.

I reject the notion that we cannot have a limitation such as this in some form or other as a guardian within this legislation because of the attitude of the EU and how it makes decisions. You know for sure that doing certain things would remove any chance of equivalence—such as leaving out a couple of articles of the main legislation. Boom! Not equivalent. There is no question. Because certain things are done in a slightly different way, maybe tweaking a little bit in a delegated Act would not be a bar, so that could possibly pass the test and go through.

I come back to subsection (2). The very first item there is a yes/no decision: are we having this, or will we neuter it to the extent that we do not have the buy-in regime of the CSDR? That is what it is all about. If we did not have the buy-in regime of the CSDR, we would not be equivalent in quite a lot of things to do with securities transactions, and maybe in things to do with our clearing houses or our exchanges. I remind the House of my interest as a director of the London Stock Exchange. These things are under active consideration, so doing something like that would, in my personal judgment, put equivalence at risk. I think you can make a dividing line through this.

Especially if there is some tentative encouragement from the Labour Front Benches, I think this is one of those amendments that usefully goes into the pot that we should be working on. The alternative is that you get even less, probably a very tight and improved version of Amendment 7, because an amendment such as this might offer not a great deal but a tad more flexibility—a tiny bit more. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Kramer]

I thought that the noble Lord described naked short selling, which I thought I just defined. Anyway, I am nervous about the idea of policies such as this. There will be enormous pressure to use this opportunity, where the Treasury alone is the decision-maker, basically to loosen the regulatory structure that we have in the UK. That issue is a fundamental one for Parliament.

I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, who talked about the need to find the appropriate place and that it is good that we can have those discussions with the Treasury, to have them with Parliament because there is another side to the argument. One reason why the UK been spectacularly successful as a financial centre is because the regulatory environment in which it functions is considered by many to be a global gold standard. If the noble Lord goes to countries such as China, India or other places, the level of trust and respect in financial institutions that are framed within those EU parameters—he could say it is foolish or sensible—is very high. It annoys the United States to heaven and beyond because so often it has loosened its regulatory standards but has not seen the business shift out of the EU into the US.

If you talk to companies, part of that reason is the reputational issue. For many companies, to be able to turn to clients and say, “I operate in the gold standard regulatory environment which means that you can trust me and what I do”, is so key to the future of their business that clients will reply, “If there is a significant loosening of standards, it might in the short term increase my profits but in the long term it will damage my regular relationship with my client base and I will need to move to the place that carries that gold standard kitemark”. Losing the kitemark is significant. That is something that this House and the other House should consider and should not be simply left to a conversation between the industry and the Treasury. It backs up our whole argument that this Bill, by transferring all those decisions simply to statutory instruments, is running into very dangerous territory.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, a couple of interesting points have been made in the context of this amendment. As it reads, it looks reasonably acceptable as we do not want gold-plating, which could potentially happen. I echo that the Commission has been particularly good at dealing with smaller companies and businesses. My experience is that that has not always been reflected in the UK when the dispensations have been a matter for the member state. On more than one occasion, I have written to regulators and others about that.

One of the points was about asymmetric effects and the fact that when we are no longer a member state the law will bear down on us when we replicate it, or nearly replicate it, in a different way from when we were a member state. It is not only in financial services legislation that this could potentially happen. It happens with contractual obligations. When we replicate Rome I and Rome II, if the other party is in, say, New York, the penalty for breach of contract will be different in the UK from what it would be in France because we no longer tick the member state box. It essentially means that the higher New York penalty will apply rather than it being limited.

I sit on one of the secondary legislation scrutiny committees, and there have been various occasions when asymmetries have come up. There have sometimes been attempts to balance them, but sometimes not. It depends. These judgments about asymmetries already appear to be going on under the withdrawal Act. From the ones that I have seen, by and large it has not looked as though we could have dealt with them differently, but the issue is worth investigating. To say that the Treasury should do what it can for small businesses is a good thing, whether or not we say that we should not be put in a worse competitive position. Our markets are bigger and, because we have bigger global markets, we may have to regulate in a way that looks stronger rather than weaker. There may be other ways that it does not suit the specificities. I would be a little worried about “no worse competitive position” taken to its extreme, but in the general sense it is possibly more acceptable.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, listening to this debate, one cannot but feel that this is about a policy decision. The last thing I want in this Bill is policy decisions which will introduce different levels of regulation and proportionality. That may not have been the intention. I did not find the words very attractive because they led me to all sorts of different scenarios. I think I heard it advocated as quite a narrow concept to provide against unintended consequences as a result of slavishly transcribing a piece of legislation. If that is the intention, it may have some attraction, but as drafted, the narrowness of that is in no way clear and the breadth of it would involve serious policy changes. It is not the purpose of this Bill to introduce serious policy changes.

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[Lord Deben (Con)]

I hope that my noble friend the Minister has listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on this matter. We are faced with a real difficulty here. We have agreed to many kinds of legislation, of which this is only one, to protect ourselves against the extraordinarily damaging situation whereby we leave the European Union without a deal. One of the dangers, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, pointed, was that, if we are not careful, we will be so sure that something is not necessary that we will not look at it as carefully as we ought.

The reason I suggest that my noble friend take Amendment 7 and the amendments that we are now discussing very seriously is this: the whole purpose of Parliament is to make sure that we expose the full extent of decisions of the Executive; it is to curb the Executive in the sense that it ensures that things do not slip through with unintended results.

I am sure that the Government have every intention of using this legislation properly; I am in no way criticising them about that. However, it is true that decisions made primarily by civil servants, which are not open to public scrutiny, can be disastrous. Any of us who have been Ministers know that; we know that one of the most important, perhaps the most important, protection the public have—and the most important discipline that one has as a Minister—is that decisions have to be debated and discussed. My noble friend knows that in this House, where we have limited powers, it is still true that very often during Committee and Report terrible gaps have been shown in legislative proposals. These are gaps which, once they have been revealed, the Government are rapidly determined to fill: to change what they are proposing because they had not meant to have that result.

In those circumstances, it is difficult, is it not, to give these powers so totally to the bureaucratic system? That is so even if one imagines that Ministers themselves have no intention of delivering other than what is perfectly in line with these legislative requirements. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that there should in all circumstances be a public discussion. The Government’s usual response is, “We can’t possibly do this as there isn’t time”. I am prepared to accept that as a generality, but this is not to impose a long-winded system; it is merely to say that what is proposed shall have sufficient public exposure and discussion to enable people to see whether it is within the proper confines of the Bill or reaches beyond it.

Although I had to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on an earlier amendment and his view of it, this one seems to draw attention to a very real issue. My noble friend and I share a considerable desire that these circumstances shall never arise. He is in no position to share my further desire, which is that we shall not leave the European Union anyway—I have no idea what his personal views are but I know what his views have to be at the Dispatch Box. The public will become less and less enamoured with this whole unprofitable and unacceptable process. If the Government want to protect themselves, at least to some extent, it is extremely important to make sure that these matters are processed in public. If they were ever to come about, the Government would find that protecting and defending what they have done was extremely hard, but why not accept that some further process beyond that allowed for in this Bill would be a democratic help in circumstances which will, we hope, not occur?

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, I agreed with the amendments of Lord Adonis; I do not agree that they are not needed, even with Amendment 7. There is still the issue of sequencing in terms of what is and is not being done; Amendment 7 does not solve the cherry-picking point or various other things. I attach quite a lot of importance to the reports provided by subsections (8) and (9). In that context, I read the amendments that added in the Bank of England. The noble Lord has explained that in the sense of taking advice from the Bank of England. But when doing these transpositions, there are inevitably delegated acts and other associated things that will be done at the level of the regulators and will not even be contained in a statutory instrument. Therefore I thought it was right that the regulators reported how things are dealt with as well as the Treasury. I support the amendment but would add the PRA and the FCA. In that way, we get the full Treasury report through to the regulators, so that we see that we are all on the same page and where the tweaks, even within the available limits, are made. So I agree with the noble Lord.

As to whether Amendment 11A is needed, there is no harm in putting it there. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and other committees will still be doing their part when the things come to them, so I see no reason not to give some work to the Treasury Select Committee.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, we have an open mind on the amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, hit the nail on the head in saying that the gap between primary legislation and the SI process is too wide. Since we are shovelling a lot of stuff into the statutory instrument process, this is a good time to consider some intermediate action. I do not move from my commitment to tighten up what is available for secondary legislation under this Act, and we will be pursuing that, but I shall listen to the Minister’s response with care to see whether this would be the occasion to make some progress in this important area and give two views of a piece of secondary legislation, instead of the usual process. No matter how hard the Minister and I, and colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, try to give some life to the affirmative SI process, we know in our hearts that we are not going to vote against it because we are not going to provoke a constitutional crisis. Some process in between the two—this may be the right one—deserves careful consideration.

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However, in our view it would not be appropriate for the Bank of England to report on the exercise of a function that falls entirely within the remit of the Treasury. While it is certainly the case that the regulators will be consulted on the design and implementation of the legislation introduced under this Bill, the question of what legislation is brought forward and how it is amended is ultimately one for government. It is difficult to see how a body that does not have the ability to exercise this power can meaningfully report on its use. When I was listening to the debate—and perhaps we can clarify this in the discussions that will take place ahead of Report—it was not clear to me whether the noble Lord and the noble Baroness were referring to reporting on the powers which are sub-delegated to the Bank of England as a result of the SIs, or to offering a view on the package or simply on areas within its remit. Perhaps in the gap between Committee and Report we could explore that a little further.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

I certainly was talking in terms of what was delegated and how it was dealing with the things that it then had to deal with. I am not sure that that was the same as the mover’s view, but mine was in the category of doing what was within its power.

[Lord Bates]

I agree, in that spirit, to take back that point and look at it in the wider context of my opening remarks in responding to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I hope that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment at this stage, because we will return to these issues in some detail at Report, hopefully with some more to say.

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[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, I have Amendment 16 in this group. As the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said, I added my name to his amendments and I thank him for trying to bring some better order to the reports and to increase the frequency with which they are produced. Amendment 16 says that the reports must include a table setting out which provisions of the financial services legislation have been transposed into domestic legislation, and under which statutory instruments. I ask for that because it is awfully difficult to know where things have been put. The Minister will recall that on several occasions when we have been discussing statutory instruments under the withdrawal Bill, I have had to go hunting for the articles of the legislation that has been transposed, and they have popped up in a different instrument and sometimes been dealt with at rather different times.

If that kind of thing is going to happen again, we need the safeguard of knowing where things have been put. In European parlance, this was called a “coronation table”, which showed where the European legislation ended up. One does not necessarily need to do that going forward, once we are amending under our own rules, but something like it would be a first step to obtaining equivalence, because we will also have to demonstrate to the EU where everything has been put. Therefore, this seems a useful addition to these reports, thereby keeping Parliament informed about how things are progressing.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, we have constantly been debating the same issue, which this amendment addresses from another direction. I am afraid that my experience of government producing annual reports is that, on average, they tend to appear every 18 months, rather than 12 months. I am not quite sure what the last report of the two does anyway, and the idea of one meaningful report every six months has a lot to commend it. Being prescriptive about its contents would also be quite useful, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Bank Recovery and Resolution and Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, probably few if any other people would stand up and say that CRD IV is their favourite piece of legislation, but for a variety of reasons it is my favourite. I do not mean to alarm the Minister or his officials by that, because we seem to have stuck within the rules of onshoring and the transfer of powers in the way with which we are now familiar. However, inevitably that process opens the door to future changes without it having to return to Parliament, as is the case in the EU, because a lot can be done via the interpretation of binding technical standards—if not immediately then at the next stage. It is not entirely clear from the explanation and from what is set out in the Explanatory Memorandum whether the binding technical standards will essentially just replicate what we have at the moment or whether they will make additional policy changes; that is, is it going to stay entirely within the “no policy change” of the withdrawal Act, or will changes be made simultaneously or subsequently?

For now, I want to concentrate on two points of personal interest. The first is the change to what counts as zero-risk weighted sovereign debt. This has long been a pet subject of mine and now it has become mainstream—in particular, that zero-risk weighting is actually inappropriate for eurozone sovereign debt because the European Central Bank cannot print money, although it has done a pretty good approximation of that in recent years. It would be interesting to explore a little more the effect of moving the zero-risk weighting from non-UK sovereign debt, given that sovereign debt is the main tier 1 liquid asset for banks. Will that mean that there is an incentive to reduce diversification in liquid assets?

More generally, how are banks currently dealing with sovereign debt in their risk calculations? The international banks most likely to have other EU sovereign debt can, and probably should, be using internal models to calculate risk rather than rely on the standard model and therefore the zero-risk weight. However, when I looked at this a while ago, the risk allocated in that way seemed to be pretty minimal, and I wonder whether that is still the case. Will minimal risk in the internal models be affected once the near-zero justification has gone? Also in the past some large banks have availed themselves of permanent partial use as a standard model under Articles 149 and 150 of the CRR, the reasoning being that it would otherwise be rather complicated due to holding a lot of different sovereign assets. Of course, Articles 149 and 150 will now apply only to UK sovereign debt, so what will happen there? Can the Minister also advise whether any UK banks are still using Article 150?

The second point I want to raise out of interest is the country-by-country reporting which comes from Article 89 of the directive and has the distinction of being enshrined in the EU withdrawal agreement as part of the BEPS commitments. The particular matter I want to highlight is that the onshoring has replaced the reference to the EU directive 2006/43/EC on statutory audits and annual accounts with the words:

“International Standards on Auditing (United Kingdom and Ireland) issued by the Financial Reporting Council Limited or a predecessor body”.


Frankly, I wish that it had not done that. At present, we have both the Kingman inquiry into the future of the FRC and the Competition and Markets Authority inquiry into audit, which encompasses the FRC and standards matters. I would expect a certain amount of criticism of the way in which the standards as applied in the UK under the FRC have not measured up to the company law of either the UK or the EU. So is that a future-proof amendment, given that the inquiry reports possibly as soon as next week?

On bank recovery and resolution, I am very happy to see the FSB key attributes referenced as a default. I spent quite a lot of time in Brussels having to wave those around during negotiations when things were going in slightly the wrong direction from time to time. As a practical matter, does the Minister consider that there is a substantial difference caused by being in only the international crisis management groups of a bank rather than in the full EU resolution procedures? I repeat my references to what the BTS are going to be doing, given the reference in paragraphs 7.19 and 7.20 in the Explanatory Memorandum. Does that suggest two lots of consultation, or is it just the same lot?

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for presenting these two instruments. I cannot but agree with the early paragraphs of the Explanatory Memorandum—which is the same in all these Explanatory Memorandums—that, essentially, if these instruments end up being used, it will be in a no-deal scenario, which would be disastrous for the United Kingdom.

Having had an original career in aviation, I intellectually accept that it is right and proper to prepare for all credible scenarios. That is what we are doing today, and we will do it in the usual polite way about another 40 times between now and the end of March. But, today of all days, one has a feeling that the no-deal scenario has crept a little closer, and I have almost a sense of being asked to dig my own grave against the possibility that extreme Brexiteers will win the day and we will end up in a no-deal situation.

The European Union (Withdrawal) Act highly limits what we are doing here, and I hope that the constraints of that Act are being fully respected. We are not here, frankly, to debate the merits of the instrument; we are here to debate whether it stops within the agreed constraints, which are rehearsed in many places. Perhaps the strongest sentence is in paragraph 7.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum, which states:

“These SIs are not intended to make policy changes, other than to reflect the UK’s new position outside the EU, and to smooth the transition to this situation”.


The process called for by the Act, in a sense, divides into two. The first part of the process, which is true of all the things we discuss today, is to reassign responsibilities—in other words to recognise that appropriate authorities are necessary for the business of the various Acts to work and they have to be moved from EU institutions into UK institutions. The second is to make policy changes within the strict limitations of the sentence that I just read out.

Discharging our narrow duty to ensure that the Government have stuck to the rules is very difficult to achieve. In theory, we could go through each SI, line by line, regulation by regulation and Act by Act to see if that is possible. I recognise that the wisdom of the noble Baroness allows her at least in part to do that, but I am afraid that with our available resources that is not possible. A poor second to that is to skim the document and look at its structure and the language that it uses.

Let me take the bank recovery and resolution SI first. It looks as though the reassignment of responsibility has been discharged because, in page after page, one finds that it takes a responsibility from an EU institution and moves it to a UK institution. However, the area that I am particularly concerned about is where the instrument uses entirely new language, because it seems to me that, where there is entirely new language, I have no way of knowing whether policy variations have accidentally arisen. Therefore, I am very surprised to see areas of entirely new language, because I would have assumed that the object of the exercise is to take rules presently in place and translate them into English law.

The most dramatic example of that is on pages 41 and 42 of the bank recovery and resolution SI, where there are two pages of fresh language that talk about the recovery plan that institutions must put in place. Now, I assume that the requirements for that plan are already effectively enacted at this time. Why, then, is it not written over—or whatever the right term is—or why is it not referenced back into the law as it exists today, so that we can see that there is no change in policy? I ask that question to see whether there is any new thinking buried in the text, and I would value an assurance from the Minister that there is good reason why those parts of the instrument are written in fresh language, as opposed to being cross-referenced to language that already exists.

In the second SI, on capital requirements, there is a clear policy change, which is there because the situation demands it. The change, as has already been spoken about, is the recognition of EEA countries as not being of zero risk and hence requiring a capital buffer. In a no-deal scenario, after 29 March such sovereign debt will have to be assigned a risk factor. Surely this will put UK banks at a commercial disadvantage. It is no good to give as an excuse, as is done in the impact assessment—and it was great to see an impact assessment, by the way, so I must put that on record—that most institutions will use the “internal ratings based” approach. While assigning risk to EEA loans is not mandatory with the IRB banks, if they do not take account of the fact that, for other purposes, such assets will be recognised as having some degree of risk, one would hope that this would be challenged by the regulators. Does the Minister agree with that analysis? Why did the impact assessment not look at some way of maintaining the status quo? For instance, it might have contained a statement that the sovereign debt of EEA countries would be treated as zero risk, or it could have included an order-making power for the Treasury to define individual countries as having zero risk.