Finance Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I pick up the point made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, that there has been a relatively small number of speakers in this debate but my goodness they have been powerful speeches, and across a very wide range of issues. I hope the Government will take notice of the quality of this debate and the range of points made.

I start with a couple of general comments. I want to pick up the point made just now by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that this Finance Bill is a very modest Bill. I think that we all know that, but it leads into the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and others that we are in a very precarious economic period. I suspect that perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, or the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, in fact many people, including the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, would not agree on the same solutions to the problem, but we can at least agree that there really is a problem and bottom out the extent of it and look for the Government to come forward with a strategy. Can I impress upon the Minister the importance of a government strategy that is realistic and faces up to the grim realities—to use the phrase from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe? We have to have that to be able to go forward effectively and successfully. I do not think that we should pretend that that role is picked up in this Bill. Please can the Minister make sure that it is picked up—and soon, quite frankly?

I want also to pick up the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, on the G7 and the global tax and to echo something that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said. I am glad to see that the G7 is coming together to tackle this issue. To me, it is a real illustration of the might of the United States and the flexing of its muscles. Almost every country will take some benefit from the changes in the way that a global corporate tax will be raised as a consequence but, in fact, it will be quite modest for most countries. The United States Treasury is the very big winner, and it is a reminder that when you delve into the world of economics and power politics you have to recognise size and power. I continue to be worried that for the UK this means being essentially a stone that is grated between big regional economies and power bases. If ever it needed to be illustrated, I think it has been the quick acceptance of the US proposals by the British Government because, frankly, they absolutely had no choice.

We have discussed a lot of the Bill in various Budget speeches so I am not going to labour those points, but I have some real pleas to put before the Minister. I am very concerned that the VAT relief rate should not rise to 12.5% in September. When we look at the hospitality industry and the pressures that it is facing, we now recognise that there may even be delays to full opening on 21 June. We know that new variants can come through. Keeping this at 5% to the end of the fiscal year surely would be sensible and would reassure the industry at this moment in time.

The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, raised the issue of individuals facing rent arrears, which will now come tumbling in on them. So many of our small business, again probably especially in the hospitality industry, are facing in excess of £3 billion in unsettled rent levies. I think the Government are going to have to step in on this and I hope they will look at providing some support specifically on rent issues. Small businesses and self-employed people are very far from being out of the woods. Again, that argues for flexibility on the furlough scheme. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, talked about it in the context of aerospace but, really, so many industries are going to need some ongoing support, or they will end up in a dire crisis. Looking at continuing furlough into the future, for at least some period, may be essential.

According to the Federation of Small Businesses, about 40% of small businesses are finding their debt levels completely unmanageable. We do not have a mechanism at the moment to convert that into a capital base. We need to be able to enable them and support them in converting debt. I think the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, has talked in previous speeches about a sort of variation on 3i, but there has to be some mechanism or else many of our small businesses are never going to be in a position to begin to grow; they will be overwhelmed by a debt burden that continues to drain them for a series of years to come.

I make one final plea again on behalf of the 3 million excluded, mainly contractors and freelancers. The Government could, at this very last minute, step in to support that group, and I ask them once again to do so. The noble Lords, Lord Bridges and Lord Forsyth, talked about wrapping this in with following through on the recommendations of the Taylor report. The environment for those businesses—and they are our future—has to be shaped by recognising the risks they face, looking at the rights and the benefits that they do without, and helping to structure the tax environment that they sit in within that overall context. The Taylor report should not be left on the shelf any longer.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, that we have a problem with freezes on income tax thresholds. It really is a mechanism to raise income tax, which is slightly ironic when the Government have basically decided not to raise capital gains tax. Some of the poorest people will now be stepping in to fill that gap. It is also ironic given that the increases in corporation tax are delayed to 2023, so income tax rises will, in effect, hit first.

While I tend not to spend a lot of my time thinking about the best paid, can I get some assurance from the Minister on the freezing of the pensions lifetime allowance? Last time, this created a real crisis for us in the NHS, with consultants realising that one hour of additional work meant that they would get a tax bill that was larger than the associated income. In fact, they could not even ask not to be paid and do the work voluntarily because of the way the system works. A large number of our senior military just got up and left because they were caught in the same conundrum—people who did additional hours on the battlefield were whacked then by the tax system. Can the Minister give me assurances that the way this is designed now will not repeat that particular set of problems? Again, with the super-deduction, I have never understood why it is analogue and not digital. Surely we want people to be investing in the technologies of the future and not just in plant and machinery. That one is completely beyond me.

I was privileged to be a member of the Finance Bill Sub-Committee, chaired brilliantly by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, and with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, also there. I am quite humble when I speak about this report, because it was driven by people of extraordinary capability—it was a very powerful sub-committee. I just want to make some quick remarks, and I will try not to be repetitive, on the three key sections that the report addressed.

I am very worried that powers are being extended before a proper evaluation of how HMRC uses its existing powers. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, made most of the comments that are relevant in this area, but it struck me—and I am making a personal comment here—that when we heard the Treasury, whether it was officials or the Minister, talk about the review of powers, it seemed more about identifying where powers could be increased and not about looking at how existing powers could be used far more effectively. We seem to have complete miscommunication around that issue.

As I remember it, that recommendation was embedded in real concerns about the loan charge and IR35—others have mentioned this—particularly because of the focus on the little people who got caught up in all kinds of schemes that they were completely unaware of and suffered very significantly as a consequence. Like others, I am delighted if HMRC is now determined to use powers, and extended powers are fine, to deal with promoters. But I am very frustrated that the retro-effective philosophy which is being used against individuals caught up in the loan charge, going back as far as 2010, is not being applied to the promoters who have accumulated huge profits in giving advice which, frankly, was from day one exceedingly questionable.

I join others in being worried about HMRC’s increasing instinct to outsource its compliance responsibilities. We are not talking about IR35 today, but the extension of the use of private companies to make the call on whether contractors they hire are caught by IR35 or not struck me as an overreach. We know that those companies, anxious not to have a fight with the tax authorities, are using quasi blanket determinations. Although an individual company can challenge a determination, it knows that at that point it gets labelled as a troublemaker and probably blacklisted for any future business. These are real problems we have with outsourcing, and they carry on into the issue of licensing taxi drivers and scrap metal dealers. At the moment, it is just an information exchange, but we can all be concerned that it is potentially the thin end of the wedge.

I join the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, in being very afraid—I think the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said the same thing—that individuals will simply disappear from the system altogether. That could mean unsafe vehicles on the road because we have lost people from the licensing system, or real abuse of scrap metal arrangements, which can descend into the criminal underworld. I do not want to put a bad label on scrap metal merchants, who are decent, honourable people, but we can see where the pressures will come. I am desperately concerned about the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, on the use of digital platforms as essentially HMRC’s information-gathering mechanism, because it takes us even further into that area, which is one we absolutely must examine.

I shall make just one last remark—I realise the time is going fast and I should stop, but this is something we should draw to the attention of the House. The third area of concern that the report raises is the oversight and scrutiny of HMRC and the powers to circumvent the safeguards of the tax tribunal. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, discussed that in some detail. The House may not recognise how necessary it is always to have such outside scrutiny.

Many of us received a copy of an email that the Loan Charge Action Group accessed through a freedom of information request. It dates to 31 January 2019, and is from Jim Harra, who is chief executive of HMRC, to a staff member. It follows a witness evidence session to a Treasury Select Committee, and refers to those to the House of Lords. It is about the loan charge. One must understand that the treatment of loan contractors depends entirely on a case brought before the tax tribunal called the Rangers case, which concerns Rangers Football Club. A decision came in 2017 which, I think, everybody who read it thought would be the weapon to use to go after companies that hire contractors and use disguised remuneration, but nobody was under the impression this could be used as the legal basis to go after individual contractors. The chief executive of HMRC wrote:

“In recent months I have repeatedly tried to obtain legal analysis to understand the strength of our claim”—


that is, the claim that there is a legal basis for going after individual contractors—“with very little success.”

I challenge anyone to show me where, in any of its evidence given to the Treasury Select Committee or the Finance Bill Sub-Committee, HMRC reflected that level of uncertainty. It demonstrates that the temptation to be parsimonious with the truth, to press on to achieve the target of maximum revenue-gathering, means that HMRC, like every other organisation, needs outside scrutiny. The importance of tax tribunals is paramount, and we must stop the constant whittling away of that power.

Kalifa Review of UK Fintech

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

The noble Lord is right: we do not want to see citizens excluded from the digital world into which we are heading, and that matter is under continual consideration. It is also worth stressing that, as a country, we are very much innovators and our consumers are keen for the sort of products that are coming out. For example, 2.5 million UK consumers and businesses now use open banking-enabled products; indeed, we were the first country to develop open banking standards, in 2018.

[Baroness Kramer (LD) [V]]

Scale-up for our fintech sector requires access to international markets. The Government overlooked this in Brexit negotiations and equivalence from the EU now looks unattainable. Fintech is problematic in trade negotiations with the US because the UK industry risks being swamped. How will this Government deliver access for fintech to major and key international markets?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, the Department for International Trade has just announced two initiatives which I hope will help to address the noble Baroness’s concerns: a new fintech cohort within the DIT Export Academy initiative to provide bespoke one-to-one advice to eligible UK fintechs that are ready to scale into key markets, and a DIT-led fintech champions scheme to promote UK fintech overseas and support UK fintechs to grow internationally through mentoring and peer-to-peer learning.

Global Minimum Corporate Tax Rate

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

As I answered to an earlier question, we are not yet in a position to announce whether we support that specific rate. Our policy has always been to put the emphasis on pillar one, which is the allocation of profits in the countries in which they are generated. To go back to my earlier point, if a company is going to use the infrastructure of a country in terms of its affluent, well-educated population, and take profits from it, it must contribute to it, too.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, do the Government understand, having listened to the international response to the Biden Administration and Janet Yellen’s proposals, that pillars one and two hang together and that there is no serious prospect of getting a solution to the right of countries to tax multinationals appropriately for the activities in their country unless there is also a common agreement on a minimum global corporate tax? Do the British Government accept that underlying principle, even if they dispute the rate?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

The overriding position is that we welcome the American Government’s re-engagement in this process. As realists, we accept it will not happen without full American support. We agree with the noble Baroness that these things hang together, and it will be a cohesive result that will work.

Financial Services Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 14th April 2021 Lords Chamber

Secondly, we know that the Post Office is increasing its profile in this area. That is greatly to be welcomed, but usually around the corner from the post office, or quite often adjacent to it, are ATMs. These were an absolute godsend to most people who were not carrying out major financial transactions and who wanted cash, but now we hear complaints from those faced with financing the ATMs. That suggests that it will not be long before the banking profession says that it cannot possibly finance them and that it is making a great loss. I say to my noble friend of the Front Bench that this needs addressing, because ATMs are vital to society as we know it, whether in distant rural areas or for people who in one way or another cannot use a bank. Having said all that, I very much second my noble friend Lord Holmes’s amendment and hope that it will find favour with Her Majesty’s Government.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, the two amendments in this group are significantly different from each other, so I am afraid that I will have to address each one separately, starting with government Amendment 14. We obviously support this step, but some comments need to be made. First, the very fact that legislation has to be passed for these financial transactions to be captured by the regulator demonstrates some of the flaws in the whole approach of using a regulatory perimeter as the mechanism for deciding which activities are regulated or not.

The buy now, pay later industry has been growing at an astonishing rate over the last several years. The largest player is Klarna, which I think was valued in its last funding round at $31 billion—three times its value six months earlier. That gives noble Lords the idea of the pace. Anybody who wants to look up buy now, pay later on the internet will find company after company. This issue has galloped away without the regulator becoming involved. It suggests to the Government that some real rethinking needs to happen, given the pace of innovation that we now see generally in finance.

Secondly, I was concerned by some of the language the Minister used when talking about this as a relatively low risk and rather benign form of financing. There is no free lunch. There is no such thing as a delayed payment that does not have an interest cost embedded in it. I understand that with buy now, pay later, it is the retailer that pays fees to the intermediary providing the advance payment. Those costs then fall on everybody buying products from that particular company. We get to the point where you are a fool if you pay up front, because within the cost of the product is embedded an element of financing that is falling on you. If you are a bit like me, you see the price and you pay it, but I know that I am paying more than I should because I am picking up the cost of financing that has been given to other people using the buy now, pay later product. There certainly is cost embedded in all of this; it is not a free lunch.

Martin Lewis gave evidence to MPs in December, pointing out that this is a product very much targeted at the under-30s, although I know that Klarna disputes this. It is having the impact of getting them into debt. Again, I looked to a quote from Jane Clack, a money adviser at the debt advice firm PayPlan. She was talking about what had happened over the two-year period. She said:

“This form of introduction to credit … supports the ‘I want it now’ purchases of items people may not be able to afford. We have seen a worrying increase in the number of young people contacting us for free debt advice. It now makes up more than a fifth of our total client base.”


This is a mechanism that is getting a lot of young people into overpurchasing and consequently into debt. Indeed, the advertising on websites directed at retailers, encouraging them to sign up to buy now, pay later firms, tells them that the average spend will go up by 20% if they sign up to a buy now, pay later scheme because individuals feel, “My goodness, if that’s all it costs I can spend even more.” Noble Lords can see the pattern that is developing. Frankly, there is a lot of risk associated with all this, and I hope it is with that perspective that the whole consultation will go forward and regulation will be structured.

I say this because we went through the same process in this House of saying “it is largely benign” when we looked at payday lending. That was the argument made by the regulator. If this House remembers, the regulator had the power to take action in a serious way against abusive payday lenders. It showed a light touch because it saw payday lending as relatively benign. It was only when this House forced the regulator’s hand by passing regulation that required it to start using interest rate caps that that industry was brought under control. Indeed, most of the players instantly disappeared, because without the abusive part of their activities the other part could not be sustained. This issue should be taken very seriously by the regulator, which should not get caught up in the idea that this is low risk or in some way benign. I am always troubled when I hear that something is interest free. No, it is not; the interest is differently packaged.

On Amendment 35, I continue with apologies from my noble friend Lady Tyler, who is the former chair of the Lords Select Committee on Financial Exclusion. As the Deputy Speaker said, she is speaking in Grand Committee and has had to scratch here. She very much appreciates the spirit of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, but I will quote a sentence from the speech she wrote that I think captures the fundamental issue: “What is still missing is an overarching strategy and responsibility across government, regulators and industry proactively to promote financial inclusion.” In a way, that is the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, is picking up and addressing and that I hear echoed in the words my noble friend would have used.

The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, made the case that the Bank of England is really not the place to have a basic bank account, and I want to pick up on this important issue. The current high street banks that provide basic bank accounts do so, as the noble Baroness said, reluctantly. It does not make any sense in the context of their business plan, their overheads or the clientele that they want to build.

There is an important strategy that could be addressed, certainly by the PRA, along the lines of, “As a condition of your banking licence, perhaps you don’t have to provide a basic bank account, but you do need to support the civil society groups that can service this excluded community”—because that is a community that often needs a detailed helping hand. That is one of the reasons why opening a basic bank account at the Bank of England would not get people in that community very far. Typically, they are people who need particular services and particular kinds of support to become financially included, and to get the advantages that come with being financially included in our modern society.

That takes me to the issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe; it is a canard that needs to be captured very quickly. The Community Reinvestment Act in the United States, to which she referred, was passed in 1977. It was not a play into the sub-prime mortgage crisis. I lived in Chicago in those years, so I know that it came about as a civil rights Act, because disadvantaged communities—primarily black ethnic communities—had been literally red-lined by all the major banking players, which would take deposits from them but would never lend back to support mortgages or businesses. It was a crucial Act that completely changed the nature of financial inclusion in the United States, and it was probably one of the most important pieces of legislation there. I have always regretted that we have not picked up its themes and extended them here, because it created a layer of community banks and credit unions that serviced this community, and did so very well throughout the years of recession.

The sub-prime crisis was, on the one hand, sheer fraud—as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, knows—and, on the other, the packaging up of fraudulent loans into portfolios against which securities were then issued on the grounds that diversification within the portfolio removed the risk. This was not a case of lending into communities in the responsible way driven forward by the Community Reinvestment Act. I hope that we will pick up the lessons of that Act, because in the United States people are not unbanked and excluded to the extent and breadth that they are here in the UK.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Government’s response to the Woolard Review was swift and positive. As doubts remained over exactly when and how Ministers’ promises on buy now, pay later products would be delivered, this Bill appeared to us to be the perfect vehicle—although, sadly, the Treasury initially disagreed with that view. In Grand Committee the Minister stressed the complexity of the issue, and the need to work with the industry to get the scope of future regulation right.

Of course we agreed on the necessity for the Treasury and the FCA to get this correct, and we are realistic about the difficulty of striking the right balance. As I have said before, we would not wish forthcoming regulatory changes to impact on the availability of certain short-term payment agreements, such as for gym membership or sports season tickets, which have proved to be relatively low risk. We also recognise that there is a growing market for buy now, pay later, and that many of the people using such services experience no problems with them. Indeed, we are grateful to the providers that have engaged with us in recent weeks and shared their ideas on next steps.

In March the boss of Klarna expressed disappointment about the concerns voiced about buy now, pay later products. He said he was “emotionally upset” by comparisons with the former payday lender Wonga. I am sure that this was not aimed at your Lordships’ House, but let me be clear that we recognise the differences. However, just because two business models vary, that does not mean that we cannot and should not learn lessons from past regulatory failure. These products may not have interest charges attached to them, but that does not mean they are risk free. That was recognised by Chris Woolard in his review when he warned that there was significant risk of consumer detriment if the market continued to grow at pace without the implementation of appropriate consumer protections.

In his recent comments, Klarna’s boss acknowledged that his firm had made mistakes, particularly in relation to how it had advertised its products in the past. Such self-reflection is hugely important, and I am sure that advertising is one of the areas that will feature in the future regulatory framework.

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[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, we do not oppose this amendment, particularly as we have the safeguard of the GDPR in place. However, I want to make one comment. One of our major frustrations with the regulator is how slow it has been to pick up on issues—how much information seems to have come its way that there is wrongdoing, yet all its actions seem to be delayed. We went through example after example of that in Grand Committee, Blackmore and London Capital being just two of the latest examples, and I think I have even missed two more scandals that have occurred in the last couple of weeks. I hope there are some other ways in which we can put pressure on the regulator to act and to do so in a more timely manner, and that it will not see this extension as an opportunity to relax and allow more time to pass before it begins to take action when it is needed.

[Lord Eatwell (Lab)]

My Lords, this seems to be an entirely sensible modification of an overly restrictive time limit on prosecutions for market abuse, and the Minister has certainly made a strong case.

I have one question associated with the Government’s note that accompanied the amendment. The Government stated that they had not found any clear rationale for the five-year limit applying in EU law and could see no reason for maintaining it in UK law. They said they understood that it had also been raised as an issue by EU regulators and they were considering a change to their law. Given that the EU is also considering a change, why have the UK Government not co-ordinated the change in our law with theirs? Is it not the Government’s “go it alone” approach that has been so damaging in the quest for equivalence? Could the Minister outline how the Government’s current stance on this change fits with the Memoranda of Understanding on trade in financial services with the EU?

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[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. In Grand Committee I gave a precis of some of the experiences of would-be students who had been deterred from going on to higher education or who had done so but then had to limit their life and activities as students because every single penny was hard to come by. As a consequence, they really did not benefit from so much of what is on offer in higher education.

I do not think that I can add anything to the incredibly powerful words of my colleagues, my noble friends Lord Sharkey and Lady Sheehan. I completely support the action that they contemplate but do so in the great hope that the Government will now make a statement that will make it unnecessary for the House to divide.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, for moving this amendment, with support from my noble friends. As I noted in Grand Committee, the Labour Party has long supported facilitating access to sharia-compliant financial services, and we therefore backed previous powers for the Government to act on the provision of appropriate forms of student finance.

As outlined both in Grand Committee and again today, the wait for the introduction of sharia-compliant finance products has been lengthy. I will not repeat the timeline cited by others but will say that we were unconvinced by the Minister’s response to the earlier amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey. Of course, we accept that there is complexity involved, but, in my experience, such challenges can be overcome when there is genuine ambition to find a solution.

The Minister previously said that the Department for Education is faced with designing a system in which students

“do not receive any advantage nor suffer any disadvantage through applying for alternative student finance.”—[Official Report, 8/3/21; col. 558GC.]

That is indeed a challenge, but it is one that I am sure can be met.

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[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 16 and I thoroughly support its intent. I have been chair of the Enforcement Law Reform Group for more years than I care to remember, and for all that time I have been aware that every side of the industry wants statutory regulation. It is not a suitable case for voluntary regulation. You need the powers that go with being set up by statute to deal with all the difficulties and conflicts that are inherent in the business of getting money out of people who do not want to give it to you.

I fully understand the Government’s caution about the drafting of the amendment, but I very much hope that everyone involved in it will hold their feet to the fire to get a suitable alternative through as soon as possible. I have one piece of advice for the Government on the amendment as drafted. It is important that whatever we create can bite on creditors. A lot of the problems in this industry have their roots in the delinquency and bad behaviour of creditors and in the disorganisation of the systems that they operate. The privilege of being able to use a bailiff should be granted only to creditors who are well set up, who have done their preparatory work, who know who is vulnerable, who have found out the right addresses, who have properly offered payment holidays or plans before involving the very expensive, onerous and sometimes distressing option of a bailiff.

When we come to have this in statute, we need some way in which a local authority, for instance, which is trying to recover debt due on council tax must demonstrate that it has done what it should in order to be allowed to use the bailiff system. There may be some other way of doing it—but not to have that connection through to creditors and think that you can regulate just by putting pressure on bailiffs would be a considerable mistake and would, in the end, result in the system not working.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I think my noble friend Lord Addington put his finger exactly on the problem here. These are a series of amendments, all of them good and strong, that tackle really significant issues that seem to affect a particular selection of our population who find themselves constantly recognised but pushed into the long grass, so that we do not get regulation of the underlying problem. I hope that today we can collectively as a House ginger up the Government to say that this really must be dealt with—not just given to working groups or consulted on yet again but put on a track to get resolution quickly.

On Amendment 16 in Grand Committee we discussed bailiffs and the need to improve their behaviour and get it within the right statutory context, so I will not add more, other than to say that with Covid and the consequences for so many people who will find themselves out of work or in debt, this becomes more urgent than ever. The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, should know that, if she finds an appropriate vehicle, we would be very willing to support on this. It must be dealt with. It would be lovely if it were in the form of a government amendment, but somebody will have to move on this very quickly or a lot of people will be paying a sad price.

On Amendment 26, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, sometimes a personal experience leads to identifying a real problem, and he has put his finger on another problem. If I were a regulator, I must say that anyone who could get my attention and show me that we are getting abuse and misbehaviour within the financial services sector ought to be welcomed. If the definition of eligible customers makes it difficult or impossible to use as broadly as it should be, a look at that definition is urgent. If I were the ombudsman or the FCA, I would certainly want to know that someone was out there attempting to scam the public. I can assure the Government that the scammers know all the loopholes and weaknesses in the definitions, so plugging them as rapidly as possible makes obvious sense.

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[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I shall be extremely brief. It is absolutely clear that bills of sale legislation is fraught with problems both legally and practically, including allowing goods to be repossessed on a single default, and giving no protection to purchasers who unwittingly buy goods subject to bills of default. The Government promised us reform, and they had a draft Bill from the Law Commission in 2017, but then they changed their mind and decided not to legislate. If they can change their mind once they can change it twice, so I hope they will now change their mind again, and take action.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I shall be brief in responding to the amendment, which was ably introduced by my noble friend Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. We are grateful to the Minister and officials for their time discussing this and other consumer issues during the passage of the Bill. Those meetings have been useful, particularly for better understanding the numbers of people affected by financial agreements enabled by the antiquated bills of sale Acts referenced in the amendment. We understand that the Government cannot simply accept the amendment, because of the complexity of the issue and the scope for unintended consequences. Normally we would roll our eyes on hearing that phrase, but, as my noble friend noted, this amendment was tabled as a means of starting a conversation. We hope the Minister can give a strong commitment from the Dispatch Box that the Treasury will undertake a proper review of this part of the credit market, and will have regard to the earlier Law Commission recommendations when deciding on a policy response.

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[Baroness Shafik (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and all the previous speakers, who have added a great deal of expertise and judgment to the debate so far. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this important group of amendments, which would make sure that there is sufficient parliamentary scrutiny of the regulators, who are the ultimate referees in determining whether financial markets are fair, effective and serve the public interest.

The key question is how to make sure the referees are doing a good job, and there were many excellent proposals put forward today on how to enhance scrutiny, including Amendments 18, 19 and 20 from the noble Baronesses, Lady Bowles and Lady Kramer, Amendment 37A from the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, and Amendments 45 and 48 from the noble Baronesses, Lady Bowles, Lady Noakes and Lady McIntosh, and the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell. Those amendments all focus on putting in place reporting requirements to Parliament. I want to focus on who is best placed to receive this reporting, given its highly specialised nature.

I realise that this is an issue not of legislation but of how Parliament chooses to organise its affairs. But what we put in legislation also depends on the institutional structures that are in place, and meaningful scrutiny needs to be adequately supported. I support the recommendations of the All-Party Group on Financial Markets and Services, which argues that to enable effective scrutiny of regulators there needs to be a new Joint Committee of parliamentarians from both Houses with a specific remit for financial services, supported by expert advice—something to which the noble Lords, Lord Blackwell and Lord Bruce, have also referred, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh.

I know from my time as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England how technical some of these regulatory issues are. A dedicated joint committee would be able to draw on independent advice and respond flexibly to issues that arise to ensure the public interest is well served. Such an institutional structure would be in the spirit of a principles-based regulatory regime, rather than relying on more detailed legislative approaches. It would also be consistent with the welcome letter sent today by the Economic Secretary to the Treasury to the chief executives of both the FCA and the PRA seeking to have proper parliamentary oversight of financial services regulation in future.

One area where potential parliamentary scrutiny of the FCA and the PRA could be useful is around how their work supports UK competitiveness. I know this is an issue that has already been covered at some length and with great expertise by this House, and I know that many have argued for strengthening the competitiveness objectives for the FCA and the PRA.

I would prefer to stick to the current language for four reasons. First, in my many years of doing surveys of investors at the World Bank, I have never seen easier regulatory standards featuring as a factor that makes a country more competitive. Instead, macroeconomic and financial stability, a skilled workforce and good infrastructure were what mattered most across the world. Secondly, just as you do not want a weak referee in order to have a good game, markets operate best when they are fair to all players. Thirdly, we have been able to support innovation in areas such as fintech through the use of things such as regulatory sandboxes, which allow experimentation while containing risk. Finally, there are many others who do a very good job of promoting financial services in the UK, including Her Majesty’s Treasury, the lord mayor and the many industry associations.

I also suggest that, for the moment, climate change is an area where parliamentary scrutiny, rather than legislation, might be useful. Central banks and regulators around the world are moving quickly to address climate risks. We are in a moment of great innovation, with climate stress testing, improved disclosure requirements, scenario planning, looking at climate exposures on both sides of the balance sheet and enhancing accountability for senior managers. All of this is wonderful, and I especially welcome the move to setting regulatory requirements for all market participants based on agreed definitions and rules, rather than relying on voluntary approaches and inconsistent criteria.

For now, I am comfortable with requiring regulators to have regard to climate issues—the recent remit letters are a good example of this—with appropriate parliamentary scrutiny of how that is happening. However, we should definitely return to this issue as part of the future financial framework once we have more evidence and experience from current innovations, so that we can codify in legislation the best possible approaches to addressing climate risks. Here as well, having a Joint Committee with access to relevant expertise would only enhance the quality of scrutiny around issues of climate change.

In conclusion, I very much hope that the Minister will be able to further reassure the House of how expert parliamentary scrutiny will enable Parliament to play a key role in future oversight of the regulators.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I will pick up some of the comments that have been made during the course of this absolutely outstanding debate on this series of amendments.

The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said that she had never heard of Ministers not attending or coming before committees. I was on the Finance Bill Sub-Committee of the Economic Affairs Committee when we dealt with the loan charge, and, on several occasions, the Economic Secretary, Mel Stride, refused point blank to come and speak to the committee. We were then informed that committees have absolutely no power to summon Ministers; they come only at their own discretion. Mel Stride’s successor, John Glen, took a very different view and came before a combined committee of the Economic Affairs Committee and the Finance Bill Sub-Committee. I make it clear that there certainly are Ministers who very strongly take the view that they can be asked to come before the House but are not required in any way to say yes.

I also pick up a concern that the noble Baroness raised about whether we have to make an absolute decision today. If she looks at the Marshalled List, she may notice Amendment 37F, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Bowles, which will come up on Monday. In fact, it is deliberately placed to give us the opportunity to listen in full to the Minister and consider this issue but still have an opportunity to make a decision on it if we decide that the Minister’s contribution does not meet the needs of the House. As such, there is an opportunity, should we decide to do so; some may wish to act today, and others may decide that they are satisfied by what the Minister says.

I also pick up the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, on the advance parliamentary scrutiny of rules. I very much challenge what they said because, for many years, in the European Parliament and the European Council, parliamentarians had the opportunity to scrutinise both directives and the rules that would flow from them in a very thorough and extensive manner and with the support of a great deal of specialised expertise in the form of specialised and experienced staff.

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[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is clearly acknowledged that there is a problem. It is evident to me that this is exactly the sort of problem that the Government ought to sort out because, as my noble friend Lady Noakes said, we have no business landing this on the lending community. It is our responsibility. The Bill is an opportunity to make sure that something is done, and I very much hope that we take it.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I think the case has been extremely well made. I usually really respect the opinions that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, puts forward, but it seems to me that she completely fails to understand the circumstances that led these people into being mortgage prisoners. They took out loans under credit checks and it was entirely appropriate, but the banks from whom they borrowed the money crashed in the 2008 financial crisis, largely through poor regulation, which lies at the Government’s door, not the door of those who took out mortgages. People with absolutely identical credit profiles who took out their mortgages with a bank which did not crash have had many opportunities to refinance, which is normal in the life of the mortgage. A standard, typical bank knows that it will vary the characteristics of its mortgage over the life if that option is sought by the mortgagee.

The group of people who took out their mortgages with banks that crashed in many cases found that those mortgages were stripped out as part of the asset rescue process that the Government went through, and the Government then sold those mortgages to completely inappropriate buyers under inappropriate terms in order to get the maximum return. I understand their motivation—maximum return for taxpayers—but they removed all of the normal relationships and embedded rights in those relationships that a mortgagee has when they take out a mortgage with a viable financial institution.

The noble Baroness treats many of those mortgage prisoners as people who are now of poor credit. These are people who have aged—we all do that. The mortgage that we take out at the age of 30 is not the same one that we would be able to take out at the age of 55, because we have got older and our career profile is different. Some of them have become ill, and therefore had reduced earning capacity. Any standard bank dealing with a mortgagee in those circumstances makes adjustments. Mortgage prisoners are not able to seek such adjustments and they have been left in dire circumstances.

The fault lay with the Government when they sold mortgages under inappropriate terms to inappropriate buyers to manage them. It treated them as though they were abstract assets, rather than a special category which has a lot of convention embedded in it, in order to maximise their sale. I very much hope that the Government will realise that they have a responsibility. They took those additional revenues, they took the benefit of selling off those mortgages under terms and conditions that they should never have permitted, and they now need to offset that by stepping forward and making sure that those mortgage prisoners can have the same access to flexibility that would have been theirs had they taken that loan out with a financial institution that did not collapse in 2007-08.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, this is an emotive issue for a lot of people. Although we recognise that the Government have taken steps to help a proportion of so-called mortgage prisoners to access alternative products, so far, we have not been satisfied with either public or private assurances received on this matter. We are familiar with the Government’s view of the importance of market freedoms and the need to keep interventions to a minimum. However, despite the initiatives that we will hear about from the Minister shortly, the fact is that the market is failing a substantial number of people.

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[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, at this late stage of the evening I shall not try to emulate the previous speaker’s length of contribution—indeed, I shall deliver a slightly shorter version of what I had originally intended to say. I speak in favour of Amendment 24, in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe.

Amendment 24 focuses on ex post analysis of the impact of changes introduced by the regulators or the Government. It therefore gives us a different lens on the impact that interventions have had in practice. My noble friend normally focuses on impact statements, which are ex ante evaluations and often suffer from highly questionable assumptions and confirmation bias. When we deal with ex post analysis, however, we can rely on outcomes and facts. That kind of analysis is really important when helping to shape policy going forward or correcting any mistakes in policy already introduced, so I support this amendment. I personally would not have gone for an annual report, because the ability to see the cumulative impact of changes is quite important but difficult to track in an annual report. However, a report is an extremely good idea.

The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, has tried to add a consumer focus to the report that my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has proposed. I think it is better focused on small business, innovation and competitiveness; to add consumer matters would dilute the focus of that report. I am not against a report on consumer protection but it would not help to stick it in the middle of something focusing on issues such as competitiveness.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, will not expect me to support her Amendment 37. The analysis we got from her and the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, seemed to be of a world I do not really recognise. I believe the financial services sector is a great success story for this country and makes a big contribution to our economy. A number of the things that noble Lords cited seemed to be clinging to an outdated bricks-and-mortar vision of what banking is really about; frankly, that is not the world we live in today. Just as we have seen that bricks-and-mortar retail is not the way forward, it will not be for banking either. We must not keep tying ourselves to the way things were in the past.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, given the hour I shall also be very brief, but I have to say I rather like the amendments in this group. I like Amendment 24, as amended by Amendment 25—I do not care if it is a separate chapter. But it is quite dangerous to get tangled into issues around competitiveness without making sure there is a lens on consumer protection at the same time. Many small businesses fall into the consumer category in reality, certainly the micro end of small businesses.

What I like about this amendment is: what you measure, you manage. We are so constantly focused on change, new regulation and new rules, without ever going back and looking at the consequences of what we have done and trying to identify what worked, what did not and where the gaps are. It seems that this proposal goes absolutely in the right direction.

There is something interesting in Amendment 37 because one of the big questions that has never been answered is: how does our financial services industry impact on the real economy, in contrast to something much more circular within the financial services economy? I do not think that one is good and the other bad but they are very significant questions, particularly in a country where we have such a dominant investment banking culture, which does not necessarily provide a wide range of relevant services to a great deal of our economic base—particularly our small business base. There is a very interesting question wrapped up in all of that. The approach of saying “We need to look at this in a serious and consistent way, perhaps regularly” strikes me as important when feeding the strategy which then informs the way in which the regulator, the Treasury and the Government behave.

[Lord Eatwell (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 24 and 25 develop the notion of an information system—the information that will be provided by the FCA, PRA and the Government to feed into an assessment of the performance and impact of the financial services sector and the regulators. Amendment 37 goes much wider, as one might have gathered from its presentation, seeking to make, or ask for, a general economic assessment of the role of financial services generally within the UK, particularly the impact of the various regulators and the Treasury.

One of the themes particularly around the discussion of Amendment 37 was that this is not done. There are shelves of academic books that do this, and there are libraries of this material, but what has not happened is that it has not been brought together and assessed in a decision-making environment on a regular basis. The problem with Amendment 37 is that it asks the FCA and the PRA to—to use a phrase that has become popular today—mark their own homework. They are not really the right people to assess themselves; there are plenty of research institutes around this country that do a first-class job of assessing exactly these issues. However, we have not brought them together very well. What is so valuable about Amendments 24 and 25 is that they are targeted on that bringing together—bringing information into what I have called the “New Scrutiny”.

I would be interested to hear the Minister reflect, when he sums up, on the information role that is represented by the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the role that that sort of information system will play in our regulatory future.

Budget Statement

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Friday 12th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

First, I join in the very warm welcome to our five maiden speakers today. I also join in the reassurances that a two-minute speech is not our normal operating procedure. I hope they will not be discouraged from active participation in this House, because we need their voices and their views.

The first role of this Budget was to provide ongoing support to the economy through to the end of lockdown. It has done that to a significant degree, but with some key and rather cruel exceptions, which I shall discuss in a moment. However, this Budget also needed to deal with the consequences of both Brexit and Covid and set in place the framework and strategy for long-term economic recovery. In that it has very largely failed.

In the short term, the Chancellor used the Budget to extend key programmes to support businesses hurt by Covid, and that is welcome. However, I still do not understand why most of the 3.8 million freelancers and contractors—hairdressers, builders, workers in the creative industries, to which many of your Lordships referred—have been excluded from any help so far, and remain excluded. Only 600,000 have been brought into SEISS; the rest remained completely abandoned. The Federation of Small Businesses has come up with sound schemes that would allow the Government to help the 1 million or so directors of limited companies, who are in effect tiny sole traders. The Chancellor refuses to include them. Frankly, that seems petty and vicious to me and confirms that the Treasury has a vendetta against that group.

The extension until October of the £20 uplift in universal credit is needed and welcome, but I do not understand why this stops when we will have so many people out of work as redundancies mount. This last year has demonstrated that universal credit needs that uplift to be permanent to be humane. Only one legacy benefit—working tax credit—gets an uplift. There is nothing, as many of your Lordships have pointed out, for disabled people and carers on legacy benefits. These people are really suffering. As I understand the Government, they are willing to give short-term help to people who are likely to return to the workforce, but for others their standard is very close to destitution.

The Chancellor said that he would come clean on the bad news. He talked about taxes—though he ducked the impact of the 5% increases in council tax—but he did not talk about cutting public spending plans. Only after the Budget did most people see that the day-to-day spend on public services will be £16 billion less than planned pre-Covid. This is despite long NHS waiting lists, the crisis in social care, children being in need of catch-up education and local authorities being under huge pressure. Disgracefully, the Government have now called for a below-inflation wage increase for NHS staff. I hope they will note the voices all over this House calling for a very different approach and proper compensation.

Even the plans to support economic growth are pallid. I have talked before about the huge shortfall in investment in the green economy and the digital economy, especially when compared to our economic rivals. Much of the investment by the new infrastructure bank will not be green—the Green Investment Bank was sold off by the Conservatives. The breakthrough fund is tiny, at £375 million, as is £500 million for e-cars and batteries—Germany has allocated €7 billion just for green hydrogen and €2.5 billion for batteries and charging infrastructure; France has allocated €7 billion just for electric vehicles. We do not have a proper plan to grow the economy and get to net zero.

Why is the “super-deduction” tax scheme to get businesses to invest limited to plant and machinery? It is an analogue proposal in a digital age. It should not exclude intangible investments, which are the backbone of the digital age. Even the reskilling and upskilling schemes reannounced by the Chancellor are inadequate to the task, when we have a generation of young people thrown off course by Covid

Eye-catching is not a substitute for meaningful. The Government reannounced their plans for freeports. The primary impact of freeports—and I have heard this from all sides of the House—is to displace jobs from one area to another. I suppose that is meaningful if the Government’s primary plan is to boost their votes in particular seats at the expense of other areas, but it is not a growth policy. As for Brexit, this Budget ignores it. When a close working relationship with the EU is needed to assure the future of financial services and the role of UK businesses in EU supply chains, we get little more than confrontation.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and no recovery is possible unless they recover. They account for six in 10 private sector jobs and many are very fragile. The Budget gives them too little too late. The recovery loan fund provides help for some, but many small firms need a mechanism to get out of debt. My party has called for a revenue loss scheme that would cover the fixed expenses of small businesses during the period when they have been forced to close. With that in hand, recovery and growth become possible.

I recognise that the Government face a tough fiscal position, but every part of our economy needs a genuine industrial and growth strategy. That is not delivered by this Budget.

Financial Services Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard
Wednesday 3rd March 2021 Grand Committee

Finally, I have listened carefully to the rationale for Amendments 81 and 82. I am doubtful about adding a new corporate offence of a failure to prevent an economic criminal offence. As a serial non-executive director of small and larger companies, I cannot see how I would guarantee compliance with what is proposed—in the UK or overseas. Many more cautious folk will feel the same, so corporate Britain would find it harder to find challenging and careful directors for its companies. That is the opposite of what I thought we wanted and is likely to lead to yet further loss of financial services firms to overseas. I hope the Law Commission will address this angle, and I would be happy to talk to it if that is appropriate. I also hope that it will talk to my noble friend Lord Hodgson, who has taken a different view today. Preventing economic crime is the job of the regulators and their enforcement and prosecuting arms backed by suitable public and moral support. That will improve the confidence that my noble friend Lady Altmann rightly seeks.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, this is such a fascinating group of amendments. I think I have rarely seen a group that includes such powerful and important amendments one after the other ranging from the relatively narrow, such as Amendment 136, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, which would be a valuable extension of the senior managers certification regime, to the fundamental, in the form of the “failure to prevent” amendments in the names of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and my noble friend Lady Bowles. Those amendments cover similar territory, and I notice that by splitting the amendments they have succeeded in garnering a wide range of signatures, thereby demonstrating that this is not a party-political issue but has extraordinary breadth across many political views in this House, so they have done that rather well.

I find these changes absolutely fundamental and, frankly, fail to understand why the Government resist them. I would argue that they are particularly important in the absence of a duty of care because of the way in which they change the locus of responsibility, if you like, or enhance it as it falls on a company in dealing with its customers and its products. I am cautious when an issue is sent to the Law Commission. I hold it in very high regard, but I notice that it is at its best when an issue is considered very narrow and limited. I am afraid that the Government may view “failure to prevent” as a narrow and limited concerned, whereas in fact it deals with the fundamental culture and sense of responsibility of major financial institutions for the behaviour of their staff and their various departments, and for the outcome for or impact on their customers.

I also support the various reviews sought by the noble Lords, Lord Tunnicliffe and Lord Eatwell. I smile at Amendment 50 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell; he has had to craft it very carefully to make it fit into this Bill. Of course, he is absolutely right: we have a public register of beneficial ownership of companies in the UK, but it is not verified. I know how that rankles with the noble Lord, as we have discussed it in the past and I have a great deal of sympathy for his position. We rely on transparency to keep the register clean, but it is an imperfect system. Frankly, I would say to anybody that no one should rely fully on the information in the register; it is only a starting point. Making it verifiable would be a huge improvement. One of the things that bothers me the most is that many people who look at the register do not understand that it is unverified. That creates false impressions and leads people, particularly those who are less sophisticated, into making decisions that put them in financial danger.

I can see where the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, is going with Amendment 51A, but I am in the same camp as other noble Lords; I pick up the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, which were also made by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, and others. We have absolutely inadequate resources for enforcement in the whole area of financial crime; that applies to the regulators and the Serious Fraud Office. Just a couple of weeks ago, I spoke to a former police commissioner and asked why, in a particular instance, he had not turned to the National Crime Agency’s Financial Intelligence Unit. The reply was, “It’s one man and a dog.” It is hideously underresourced. Also, our local police forces, which so often end up bearing the brunt of enforcement, are not resourced to deal with crime of this specialist nature and reach; neither are they sufficiently resourced when they come across companies with vast resources. The inequality of arms is exceedingly questionable.

On other days, we have spoken extensively of the HBOS Reading fraud—to the point where I think everyone is now familiar with it—but I wonder whether people realise that the case was pursued by Thames Valley Police only after the regulators, the Serious Fraud Office and two other police forces refused to pursue it. They did so not because they thought that there was insufficient evidence but because they did not have the resources to do it: it cost Thames Valley Police £7 million to prosecute. The fraud itself amounted to some £800 million, of which only £250 million was placed in evidence in court because that was sufficient to get the necessary convictions. It quickly became evident that this was a very serious fraud case. Many of us are concerned that similar fraud cases are simply ignored by police forces that cannot step up to the plate. I note that the entire financial penalty paid by HBOS was commuted for good behaviour so it was only £45 million, but every penny went to the Treasury and nothing went back into enforcement. We must tackle this issue, which will only get worse as we move into the era of cryptocurrencies and more digital financial transactions; for example, FATF identified crypto-thefts, hacks and frauds totalling $1.3 billion in the first five months of 2020.

I will focus most of my remarks on my amendment, which proposes to create an office of the financial services whistleblower. It is a probing amendment; noble Lords will understand why in a moment. Very many of the people who speak out to expose wrongdoing find that they become the target of retaliation and lose their livelihoods and careers. They are most often employees—that is not always true; they can be clients as well—and this is very much true in financial services.

When I was an MP and therefore a prescribed person, I assisted colleagues with two whistleblower cases. Both individuals had their lives shattered by retaliation from the financial institution that had misbehaved, despite their passing absolutely critical information to the financial regulators. Confidentiality was on paper only because, being good employees in one case and a good client in the other, they had raised the issues inside the organisation first. Their information also made it pretty obvious who had spoken out. I am no longer a prescribed person, but I work with the APPG for Whistleblowing and I have heard from numerous MPs about today’s cases, not cases that predate changes in rules, legislation and regulation. I have talked to regulators and civil society groups and they have all confirmed that there has been relatively little effective, real-world change.

If whistleblowers are employees they are typically fired—not for whistleblowing of course; there is always another coincidental reason—so they spend their savings in the long process of going to an employment tribunal, which can take years. Three years is nothing to go through an employment tribunal, given appeal processes. In the employment tribunal, the regulators to which they provided information refuse to give evidence in their support. My noble friend Lady Bowles raised this issue; it is a shocker and most people do not realise it. The regulator says that the tribunal is not about whistleblowing, so there is no reason for them to give evidence that the person happened coincidentally to be involved in these various cases. Frankly, I find it shocking that they do not believe that their responsibility to a whistleblower extends to that role.

Whistleblowers often face expert counsel paid by the employer. They know that if they lose the case they will have to pick up that legal counsel’s fees. That is a huge inequality of arms. In the end, most accept a modest settlement out of sheer fear and exhaustion. Whistleblowers desperately want wrongdoing stopped and put right. Where neither the regulator nor the law enforcement agency decides to act on their evidence they cannot turn to the public or the press because the settlement agreements invariably include draconian non-disclosure clauses.

The existing legislation, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, was once ground-breaking. Now it is inadequate and out of date. Even the EU, which has never been a leader in this field, is about to overtake it with much more effective directives.

I am, among others, campaigning for an office of the whistleblower. One reason why I will not press the amendment is that we actually need an overarching office covering all sectors, public and private. Whistleblowers need one place to go to find out where they stand, get support and advice, source the financial means to fight retaliation and, if necessary, get appropriate compensation for their damaged careers—for most whistleblowers, whistleblowing is career ending. The amendment covers a wide range of needs. I also see an office as one that can work with regulators to design a much better system that means that whistleblowers come forward and are taken seriously, stopping bad behaviour in its tracks.

The US is extraordinarily effective in this area, and it aggressively protects and rewards whistleblowers because they both expose and deter abuse and crime. Since the Dodd-Frank Act—the key whistleblowing legislation—was passed in 2010 and set up their own Office of the Whistleblower inside the Securities and Exchange Commission, that commission has collected $2.7 billion in fines and penalties on wrongdoers in financial services whose conviction depended on whistleblowers. One federal prosecutor I spoke to just a couple of weeks ago described whistleblowers as “a citizens’ army” with a deterrent effect without which the regulators and law enforcement could not succeed. The United States takes this so seriously that the first conversation with a financial whistleblower or their legal representative is with an experienced investigator of at least five years standing versed in financial practice and law.

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I ask Peers to join me in supporting Amendment 136F, but this will have to be on Report. I hope the Minister will respond to Amendment 136F at the end of the group beginning with Amendment 79, where it is currently, wrongly, grouped. I beg to move.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I spoke at length on the previous group, so I am going to pay penance and try to be much briefer on this one, even though this is an issue that I also care about passionately. I do not think I can start without acknowledging all the incredible work done by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, in this arena. He has genuinely moved the issue on by sheer determination, a baton now picked up by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins.

The statutory debt repayment plan element of the debt respite scheme needs to come into effect as soon as possible. I suspect that we all acknowledge that, but the impact of Covid makes it more important than ever. When we talk about a timetable—I am thinking of the speeches by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan and Lady Ritchie—we know that a group of people who will probably never have experienced financial difficulties will now be drawn into a system where they are overwhelmed by their debts. One can see that this is an opportunity for the less scrupulous to take advantage. Even those who regard themselves as perfectly professional and ethical will look for weaknesses in the system in order to get paid. There is pressure on both sides. I have therefore added my name to Amendments 52 and 67.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, raised a number of interesting issues but he can probably take comfort in the fact that there is a sort of Scottish template, if you like, in that experience in Scotland will help to make sure that the programmes in England—I assume this covers Wales as well—will benefit and learn any necessary lessons. That should remove a lot of the anxiety and some of the teething problems.

The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, is completely new to me. It seems entirely logical that we should have a proper framework of oversight for bailiff enforcement.

I also strongly support Amendment 111, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, to bring lead generators for debt advice and debt solution services under FCA regulation. I have worked on many financial services Bills over the years, particularly on the consumer side, and it is almost breathtaking how many people and groups are totally unscrupulous and use any opportunity to gouge people when they are anxious and worried. One can just see the exploitation that could happen here. I ask that the issue be taken more broadly, that the FCA go on the front foot and anticipate where unscrupulous individuals might try to exploit the situation, and that we see if we can to some extent head it off at the pass. We are quite good at doing something when thousands of people are complaining that they have been taken advantage of; it might be very useful if we turn that around and try to anticipate where trouble could come from and see whether we can deal with it.

The issues have been so well laid out by others that I will not repeat them, but I join in asking the Government to respond to these amendments, particularly those on the timetable, with some very strong assurances at the very least.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, we have spent an hour and a quarter debating a clause that is two thirds of a page long in a 182-page Bill. This, at first sight, might seem unreasonable, but when you look at the clause from the point of the view of the individual citizen, it is probably one of the most important in the Bill, so it is right that we have done so. There are an amazing 19 amendments to this clause, which would normally imply concerted opposition. In fact, that has not been the mood of the debate at all.

To sum the clause up, it has dealt well with one of the concepts, but we have too little detail. My noble friend Lord Stevenson of Balmacara seems in many ways to have been the father of this concept, and I congratulate him. We have adjacent desks, and I have seen him busily dealing with issues such as this. His two amendments seek to flesh out how the clause would bring in proper regulation, a degree of reasonableness and recognition of the role of bodies related to national and local government; they also address the importance of protection from bailiffs, and funding.

The noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, brought in the idea that we must have a hard deadline, and the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, introduced the concept that we need advice for individuals. A timetable of December 2024 was gazumped by the noble Baroness, who suggested instead May 2024. It is important that the funding issues be addressed, especially if this fine concept is improved, because it could always go wrong if they are not faced up to. Again, this brings home the importance of regulation.

Finally, we have the 11 amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I hope he will not mind me saying that they are very “Lord Lucas-like”, with each small detail adding value to this legislation. I say that in order to illustrate that most of the amendments are complementary.

I ask the Minister to recognise the degree of clear, cross-party consensus on this important clause. Many people have urged him to make concessions. My experience is that Ministers making concessions on the hoof is considered rather dangerous; hence, this is unlikely. But I do strongly urge him not to reject too many of these ideas. His brief probably says that the wording will not work. Wording never works when it is from the Back Benches, but the ideas work, and these ideas are powerful and need to be taken account of. I hope there will be a further round of conversations before Report, and that the Government will come back with a composite proposal that improves this important clause. I fear that if that does not happen, we will spend a lot of time on Report, and there will be a more muscular approach from those who tabled and who support these amendments.

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[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, that was a very interesting intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, which enhances her reputation as a banker of some repute. I am sure her figures are absolutely right; I was still writing them down as she finished. She has made the case that you need to be able to do these sorts of sums and mathematics if you are dealing with the sorts of debts we have been talking about for most of the afternoon.

I put my name down to speak on this debate, but not because I have a particular view on the merits of the amendment, which I thought was extremely well argued by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. She raised issues on the wider context of how debts are managed in society, which I think the Committee will be very grateful for having on its mind as we focus on the issues. She gave us a tour d’horizon of the various ways in which those who run into unmanageable debt have to deal with the process of repaying, absent a debt respite scheme and absent a scheme under which statutory repayments are organised. They are extremely tough and, to go through an IVA, a debt relief order or full bankruptcy is not something that one would recommend to people if there was another way of doing it.

Indeed, part of the debates we have been having are about how wide we should take this discussion. As my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton mentioned, the way debt impacts on society is something that is worthy of wider consideration in a more general sense rather than in relation to the particularity of the processes that we are involved in.

That said, it is good that we are having this debate about the wider context within which debt operates in society. It is not a debate that you hear very often, and it is an area of policy that could be afforded a lot more consideration. As such, I will join with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, in suggesting that the amendment should not progress at this stage, but for completely different reasons. I think there is a better way of dealing with this relating to the way debts are sold.

The argument that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, made, which is that this is how financial institutions obtain the liquidity necessary to maintain the cycle of lending on which we all depend, means that we need to have a better understanding of what happens when debts go wrong and when big institutions of the type that she talked about have to deal with the consequences. I do not mean to go through that in any real detail, but perhaps when the Minister responds he could take into account some of the thinking on this for when we look in detail at the regulations that he has promised us sight of on the statutory debt management plan, and in relation to what I think will be necessary at some point in the not-too-distant future: a reconsideration of the role of the debt relief order and the IVA’s structure, which is part and parcel of the process of dealing with this.

The essential point here is about how, and on what basis, those who have decisions to make about debt make them about individuals who have repayments to make. My understanding, picked up over the time that I was at StepChange, was that, by and large, we are not dealing with a very large proportion of society who are feckless about incurring debts. What tended to come across to me from looking at StepChange’s clients, listening in to the calls that were made to it and observing some of the emails and discussions around electronic systems was that most people—the huge majority—were appalled to be in unmanageable debt situations and were desperate to make a repayment. However, they did not have the financial knowledge and understanding of the system and the world in which they were operating to deal with it themselves. They needed help, which led to the debt advice and the subsequent process of repayment that we have been talking about.

However, at the heart of this is the same calculation that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, made: if someone in a credit card organisation or bank is lending money to someone and learns that that debt is going wrong, then there is an immediate calculation of the likely return from it. While we in this country stick to the idea that the creditor must always be repaid in full—or as close to it as possible—the reality is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, explained it, that a decision has to be reached about what proportion of that debt will be repaid and over what timescale.

My impression is that we are talking about a very large difference in perception. I return to the noble Baroness’s example of a £100 debt that goes bad—she says that one in five will not repay. In a sense, that is the start of the conversation that the person who made the loan has to have with their boss to assess what rate of recovery the loan will have. I believe that we need to have further understanding—not necessarily today or on this Bill—about how that process needs to work better for society. I agree with my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton: a social issue needs to be addressed at some point, not necessarily today.

If it is true that a loan of £100 has a default rate of at least one in five—I suspect it is higher than that—then we should not be thinking in terms of trying to get a 100% return; we should set in our minds a figure that society could accept and which would be more reasonable in relation to the overall quantum of debt, better afforded by those who need to make repayments and more acceptable to those who do the lending. We are not yet there, and I do not have a solution to this; we are probably too early in the process of discussion and debate. I look forward to the Minister’s comments. This is a conversation that we should have more generally, away from a Bill, on a broader understanding of debt in society.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and I very rarely seem to agree on the types of issues covered in this amendment, but on this one we are totally of one mind. I am very grateful because I tried to write an explanation of how this process would work and it was so inferior. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, not only explained it very clearly, step by step, but included numbers, which makes it much more evident.

I think there must be some misunderstanding. As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, explained, it is perfectly normal for an originating company to sell off the loans it has, sometimes because it can sell them to someone who has a different funding profile or a different tolerance for the average duration of the book of loans being sold, or because somebody may take a different view on how many of the loans will pay in full, pay in part or default. It is a perfectly standard process and provides liquidity to the market. As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said, if an organisation had to keep all the loans it generated on its books and could not sell them off, it would find very quickly that it was constrained in doing any new business. That would be hugely damaging to many of the people who go out and borrow. It tends to be a completely different business that will buy loans in the secondary market.

The question that underpins this is: is the Statutory Debt Repayment Plan right and fair when it is put in place? If that is true, it should not matter if the money is paid to the originating company or to the secondary buyer. Within the portfolio, there will be some people who can and do meet the full obligations of the Statutory Debt Repayment Plan, and surely that is appropriate. There will be others who fail and end up in bankruptcy, and whoever is holding the loan will lose out.

My question is whether there is any read-over from the kind of issues we have had with mortgage prisoners. It is important that where there are expectations about how the original lender will behave, they are carried over to the secondary lender. For example, if the original lender is quite likely to offer an alternative loan or new terms and conditions or whatever else, you would expect to see that reflected in the secondary lender. I would not want a situation where the secondary lender was able to levy additional charges or put additional costs on the borrower that would not have been expected by the original lender but perhaps are not covered in the minutiae of the contract.

Otherwise, the honest truth is that I just do not understand this amendment. I am absolutely certain that it completely seizes up any possibility of having a secondary market, and the people who will pay the greatest consequence for that are those who need to go out and borrow from time to time and are at the margins of being appropriate borrowers.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I think this debate brings out the fact that we do not fully understand this area. There is obviously a case for a great debate. We are, sadly, going to see many more people in heavy, chronic debt and we will see people—to use a colloquial term—fall apart. When people have debt and cannot see how they are going to cope, they lose their equity in society.

Perhaps I am being unfair, but I see a conflict here between people—human beings—and loan books and technocrats. That is not a very useful comment. I cannot argue that this particular amendment should be pressed, but the debate about it brings out that we almost certainly do not have all the mechanisms, and the understanding of the human beings involved, to face the many more people who will be in chronic debt when we, who are not in that situation, are talking about the Covid crisis being over. Those people need society’s help, and for them to have that, we need a much better understanding of the impacts on those people and how we can make sure that the excesses of the people who hold the books are restrained.

Financial Services Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 28th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I join in the very warm welcome extended to the noble Lord, Lord Hammond of Runnymede, and the noble Baroness, Lady Shafik, who introduced themselves so powerfully in their maiden speeches.

This Bill may look technical, but it deals with a number of crucial issues, including the stability of our financial institutions. The Bill incorporates Basel III by using skeleton clauses that lay out policy at a very high and general level. It then eliminates secondary legislation and hands to the PRA the power to develop policy through its use of rules. It gives the regulators almost unlimited rein to craft rules that could be at the weak end of international standards, or the strong end, without parliamentary interference. The PRA faces no meaningful accountability, only delayed and minimal transparency, and an occasional review by a Select Committee.

The Financial Conduct Authority expects to follow the same template for the activities it regulates, as it makes clear in the financial regulatory framework review now in consultation. I join others in being shocked that this Bill does not wait for that consultation to be completed, but I think it indicates that the Government have already made up their mind. The PRA will later this year expand the scope of this template to cover its remaining activities. This is not delegated powers; it is the permanent removal of Parliament’s powers in the area of financial regulation. It is not just temporary; it is permanent. Let me quote from the framework review, which states that

“this approach will result in greater policy responsibility and discretion for UK regulators than has existed at any time since the early operation of FSMA following its introduction 20 years ago.”

FSMA 2000 is the regime that underpinned the culture—the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, reminded us of the importance of culture—and the naive regulation that led to the 2008 collapse, failed us over Libor and failed us for years over PPI. I could go on with other examples, but quite a few noble Lords have already done so very usefully. I hope that the Minister will look back and examine their speeches.

I am shocked on three grounds. The first is the general contempt for Parliament. We so often today see the pattern of skeleton Bills with policy then enacted through statutory instruments. However, this is even more cynical: a skeleton Bill with policy then set by the regulator in its rulebook. There is not even a semblance of accountability. This is not designed for flexibility, because we have plenty of fast-track procedures; it is deliberately designed to ensure that no effective oversight or challenge can be made by Parliament.

Secondly, we are at a critical time following Brexit, as my noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie and others reminded us. There is no way that the EU is going to grant anything but limited and temporary equivalence to financial services if they are only governed by rules in a regulator’s rulebook and can be changed without any parliamentary process. Indeed, I suspect the United States—I am thinking particularly of Janet Yellen—will be nervous of any equivalence rulings in the absence of any significant legislative underpinning. My noble friend Lady Bowles and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, raised real issues that remain unanswered and I hope that the Minister will address them.

Lastly, I am shocked because although I respect the integrity and intelligence of our regulators and recognise that they have more substantive powers than in 2008, I am still certain that this is not enough to discipline a sector where arrogance and greed have such a history of motivating bad behaviour. I sat on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards for nearly two years. Senior managers who are respected figures, many with gongs and widely recognised, had rushed for short-term, false profits to boost their huge bonuses, and boards of directors were intimidated into silence over reckless behaviour. The regulators failed to speak out, obsessed with regulatory perimeters and constrained by a deep deference to the big institutions. That deference remains, and today the noble Lords, Lord Sikka, Lord Northbrook and Lord Desai, have given us some very powerful examples, which again I hope the Minister will examine.

The regulators also lack the resources to take on the industry, and I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, who took us through some examples of that. The reports from the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and the legislation that followed changed the landscape, but many of us on the commission feared that the powerful financial institutions would bide patiently and, as memories of the 2008 crash faded, would carefully—we guessed in our conversations that it would take 10 years—persuade the Government to unwind the constraints that prevented the high-risk gambling and the crafting of loopholes to increase both power and bonuses. This Bill tells us that we guessed that timing pretty right, and I would remind the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, who advised after-the-event oversight but not before-the-event oversight, that that approach pretty nearly destroyed the economy of this country.

It is an irony that the Bill deals with the final end of Libor and the other IBORs, abused in one of the biggest stains on the reputation of the UK’s financial services sector and its regulators. If we want an example of deference in the Treasury and in the regulators, we should listen to these words in the Explanatory Notes to this Bill. The reason that the notes give for ending Libor and similar benchmarks is:

“in response to cases of attempted manipulation of IBORs”.

Attempted? Fake submissions were made by the major banks in London every day for at least a decade, and probably two, in order to get a Libor benchmark that would boost the bonuses of traders and senior managers. Every day for those one or two decades, more than $400 trillion in outstanding loans across the globe were corruptly priced. The knowledge among regulators was evident, partly because the banks in their arrogance made no attempt to hide it, but also because the Bank of England got in on the act, asking banks to manipulate their Libor submissions for the more public-spirited purpose of hiding the depth of the 2008 crash. The scale of the corruption was so large and pervasive that it cannot be unravelled.

I have two other quick comments on the contents of the Bill. Many in the financial services industry have pressed for an international competitiveness requirement for the regulators, and there is in the Bill a “have regard” for both the PRA and the FCA, at least for certain sectors. We heard about that again today from the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Bridges of Headley, and others. The industry says constantly that it does not seek a reduction or dilution in regulatory standards, but I—and, I suspect, many others—am going to take some convincing that this competitiveness provision is not doing just that, and driving standards down.

Secondly, the clauses on statutory debt repayment plans and the debt respite scheme are good, but they fail to include a clear implementation timetable. I support those actions, but please may we have the timetable? With Covid, it is now exceedingly urgent.

The Bill is also noteworthy for everything that it does not include. This House will need to remedy that. I have quite a long list, but today the hour is late, and I shall mention only two. The first is a duty of care by financial institutions to all customers. My noble friend Lord Sharkey, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and others, highlighted that need.

The second—although it is not second in terms of priority—is action to motivate and incentivise the financial services sector to support our goals on climate change. My noble friends Lord Oates and Lady Sheehan and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, all spoke about that, and so did many others. It is crucial that those additions be made to the Bill. There are also other priorities, such as financial inclusion, but I will not go through that list now.

If there has been one message in this debate, which the Minister must now address, I can cite what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. She and I do not often see eye to eye on an issue, but she talked about the accountability deficit. If regulators are to be given such untrammelled powers as the Bill anticipates, will the Minister tell us now how they are to be held accountable to Parliament? He has heard the words of so many in this House, from all Benches and all political persuasions, who have made it clear that accountability is required.

Economic Update

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, as ever I am grateful to the Minister for putting this Statement on the record and leading our scrutiny of it. The picture painted by the Chancellor yesterday was a bleak one. Given that his personal brand centres on optimism, it is clear why he has resisted appearing before the Commons until now. Before turning to yesterday’s Statement, I gently say to the Minister that announcing £4.6 billion of expenditure via a Written Ministerial Statement last week was wrong. I hope he will assure us that both Houses will receive verbal updates in future.

As outlined in the Statement, economic performance in 2020 was understandably poor by conventional standards. The Minister will doubtless disagree with me, but this was arguably exacerbated by the stop-start nature of the Government’s response to the pandemic. The outlook for the economy this year and beyond is equally worrying. Even with nifty accountancy tricks, the projections fall far short of where we would like to be. I have commented previously about the speed at which the OBR predicts annual economic growth will flatten out at an unremarkable 2%. I have regrettably seen and heard nothing from the Government which resembles a plan for addressing that concern. We recognise, as we have at all stages of the Covid-19 crisis, the colossal scale of state intervention over recent months. It has been unprecedented, but there is no doubt that challenging times call for such measures.

The Minister will know that we are fast approaching a calendar year since the first national lockdown and the launch of various economic measures that accompanied it. Despite the passage of so much time, current support still falls far short of the Chancellor’s pledge to do “whatever it takes” to help the nation through these tough times. The Government say that not every job can be saved, but more could have been rescued had Mr Sunak provided greater certainty on employment support last year rather than trying to extricate himself from it at the earliest opportunity—in the face of all available evidence. As sure as night follows day, the U-turn came, but the harm had already been done. It is ironic that he now appears to champion the furlough scheme as one of his greatest achievements.

We needed swifter intervention in the creative industries, to support hospitality firms and supply chains, and to support the aviation sector. Despite their worth to our economy, many unanswered questions remain about the future of these sectors. Ministers have shamefully refused to address well-documented shortcomings of the Self-employment Income Support Scheme, where arbitrary criteria have left millions relying on universal credit, which is already insufficiently generous and at risk of a significant cut from April. We would have accepted a declaration of intent in the event of full details not being ready; as it happens, we did not get even an acknowledgement of the problem.

The Chancellor could and should have used yesterday’s Statement to outline his plans for addressing these issues and many more, including backing local authorities rather than forcing them to raise council tax. Compliance with guidance on self-isolation is believed to be heavily influenced by an individual’s financial circumstances. The Chancellor knows this yet failed to announce new incentives to help people do the right thing. His Statement was also a missed opportunity to provide much-needed additional help for the homeless, who have, tragically and literally, been left out in the cold. Can the Minister shed any light on why these issues were not directly addressed in the Statement? Can we expect them to be addressed soon, or will the Government continue to hide behind flimsy and unsubstantiated claims?

We are trying our best to support the Government as they tackle this pandemic, and will continue to do so. However, to rebuild public confidence in their response, we need greater honesty, accountability and consistency. The arrival of multiple vaccines against this coronavirus is crucial in our fight to overcome it, but we are still getting different messages and timeframes depending on which member of the Cabinet we hear from. Whether it is in respect of the number of Covid-19 infections and deaths, the state of our economy, the struggle to end inequality or even Brexit disruption to supply chains at border crossings, Ministers warn almost daily, apparently without contrition, that things are likely to get worse before they get better.

We understand that the new strain required changes to plans over Christmas, but, as with the furlough U-turn, clarification came much too late. Despite that experience, the Government have set themselves the target of schools returning after the February half-term and life beginning to look more normal by Easter. Does the Minister stand by these dates? If it transpires that they will be missed and children will remain at home, will the Government look for additional help for teachers and a legal right for parents to request paid, flexible furlough? Can the Chancellor announce future financial support at the earliest opportunity, to give businesses and workers maximum certainty?

[Baroness Kramer (LD) [V]]

The Chancellor has once again responded to a long-term economic crisis with only very short-term measures. The evidence from the Resolution Foundation of sharply growing inequalities is scary, frankly, as low-income families have to spend more to survive the pandemic. Will the Government at least make permanent the £20 uplift in universal credit?

Economic recovery cannot take hold before the summer even with a successful vaccine rollout, so will the Government now extend furlough, SEISS, the loan and various other support schemes at least to July, if not beyond?

Why have the Government continued to exclude 3 million of the self-employed from help, especially now that the Federation of Small Businesses has devised a scheme that avoids the risk of fraud? The FSB has also pointed to the recapitalisation crunch that could destroy businesses in 2021. Where is the long-term economic plan for recovery that businesses need to enable them to hang in, protect jobs, invest and grow again?

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office and the Treasury (Lord Agnew of Oulton) (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, for his comments. I shall to try to address some of his points.

It is clear that the UK, along with the rest of the world, continues to face economic disruption in the wake of the Covid pandemic. No major economy has avoided a dramatic fall in its GDP in the past year. In the face of the significant and far-reaching impact of Covid, the Government’s priority has been to protect lives and livelihoods with a flexible and adaptable response. This response is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world, totalling more than £280 billion since March. The IMF judges the UK’s initial response as being aggressive, effective and an excellent example of well-co-ordinated action.

While we should expect the economy to get worse before it gets better, as my right honourable friend the Chancellor said yesterday, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic for the future. The peak of the unemployment rate is expected to be significantly lower than that estimated earlier in the crisis. The OBR has revised down its central scenario from 12% in July’s estimate to 7.5% in November’s estimate. The household savings ratio has reached its highest level since records began in 1963. The corporate sector cash buffers have improved, with large businesses making large net repayments every month since May. The furlough scheme has seen some 1.2 million employers and almost 10 million employees supported and has been extended until April to provide certainty during these difficult times. We have provided significant support to the creative industries through the £1.5 billion Culture Recovery Fund and to the hospitality industry, which I recognise has been severely impacted by the restrictions. It has also been supported by cash grants, loans, VAT reductions and deferrals, and business rate holidays.

The support for the self-employed has been unprecedented and among the most generous of schemes in the world. It has so far supported almost 3 million people at a cost of nearly £20 billion. As the Chancellor has said, sadly we are not able to save every job and business and, in recognition of this, have boosted the welfare system by £7.4 billion in 2021.

I thank the noble Lord for mentioning the vaccine, which represents a significant sign of hope and a path out of the coronavirus. Vaccine rollout is our most important economic lever and we have made available more than £6 billion to facilitate that. We have now administered more than 2.4 million vaccine doses across the UK. By 15 February, we aim to have offered a first vaccine dose to everyone in the top four priority groups identified by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.

The road ahead remains tough, with significant uncertainties. The Chancellor and this Government will continue to work to support individuals, businesses and public services during this time. As the Chancellor said yesterday, he will provide an update on the next stage of our economic response to coronavirus and the economic outlook for the rest of the country in the Budget on 3 March.

On retaining the uplift in universal credit, referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, as with all responses so far in the crisis, we have tried to adapt to changing circumstances and this matter will be kept under continual review. In the same vein, we have extended furlough until April, it already having been extended from an earlier time, and we will continue to be alert to the state of the economy.

On the noble Baroness’s point about the self-employed and the Federation of Small Businesses, my right honourable friend the Chancellor said yesterday that he was considering the ideas put forward by the FSB.

European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD) [V]]

My Lords, Martin Wolf writing in the FT last week accurately described the EU and the UK as “equally sovereign” but “not equally powerful”. This deal not only locks in that imbalance but leaves the UK in a position of dependency that I find quite shocking. As someone who opposed Brexit, I always regarded this deal as damage limitation, but I never expected any British Government to give up so much for so little.

Because of time, I will limit my remarks to financial services, a key pillar of the UK economy—perhaps its most important one—that provides nearly 2 million jobs and over £75 billion a year in tax revenue. With the signature on this deal, our negotiating leverage to protect key parts of this industry has disappeared. We have already seen more than £1.2 billion in assets shift to the EU. How could any responsible Government put the UK economy in this position?

Of course we keep domestic financial services, but our global role depends on our ability to be the overwhelmingly major player in the euro-denominated financial markets. The US has been repatriating dollar activity to New York; China has no intention of outsourcing any significant portion of its financial services; and India is equally committed to growing its own capacity. We are entering a period of regional blocs and rivalries. We are Europe’s hub or no one’s hub.

This is now entirely in the EU’s hands. It has the luxury of building capacity in the 27 at its own pace and then, like the python, gradually squeezing to require a shift out of the UK. In asset management, where, frankly, the Government always thought the sector would just “brass plate” in the EU, the industry has been adding jobs in the 27 at a pace unimaginable before Brexit. Now the EU is consulting on tightening its rules on outsourcing to push the trend further. In commercial insurance, the Herculean task of transferring contracts from the UK to the EU is close to complete, and Lloyds of London is now Lloyds of London and Brussels. Derivatives clearing, a global, trillion-dollar industry which underpins London’s global role and keeps a huge range of related activities in the UK, has been given temporary equivalence by the EU for 18 months with guidance to EU companies to use that time to shift their business to the 27. Even growth in fintech depends on an agreement on data exchange, which is not in this deal. An MoU by March will set a framework for regulatory co-operation—if we promise to be good.

We face a slow erosion, only because the EU is happy for it to be a slow erosion, but the pace and the proportion will be at the EU’s choice. That is the effect of this very botched deal.

Taxation (Post-transition Period) Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 16th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, it is astonishing when the most important comment to make about a Bill is that the British Government have changed their mind and do not intend to use it to break international law and subvert agreements in existing treaties. I really do not understand what sort of hubris led the Government to attempt to take such a position in this Bill and the internal market Bill, but they have done real damage to Britain’s international reputation.

As for the Bill itself, it is troubling that, once again, the Government seek to diminish Parliament’s role by doing so much through negative SIs. The Northern Ireland protocol deals with a complex situation with many sensitive political ramifications—the supply chains alone are far from straightforward. A no-deal result to the UK-EU trade negotiations would make matters seriously worse. In those circumstances, Parliament should be fully engaged. Cutting Parliament out is not the way the Government should have moved within the Bill.

Much of the cross-border trade between Ireland and Northern Ireland involves small businesses. The Government’s answer to new problems for small businesses, which will be legion, seems to be trusted trader status. I sit on the EU Goods Sub-Committee. Small businesses have told us that the trusted trader scheme is simply not fit for purpose. It is complicated, expensive and disproportionate. It must be reformed, but so far the Government seem deeply resistant and certainly seem not to have addressed such issues in their trade negotiations. Therefore, no change is reflected in this Bill. It is an instrument that most will simply not be able to use.

The Bill also allows for new trade rules to be introduced gradually for supermarket supplies and medicines, and that makes sense. But it would have made more sense if it had been extended far more widely. I and my colleagues have called for a six-month adjustment period for all goods and small businesses that form our trade with the EU. Frankly, in the time of Covid intensifying—I suspect that when the Bill was conceived there was an expectation that it would be meandering away at this point—it is even more imperative to apply a much broader breathing space. I hope the Government will rethink that in these last few days.

Lastly, I will touch on VAT. HMRC has said that, in so far as possible, VAT will be accounted for by businesses and individuals as it is today as goods cross the Northern Ireland border. I attended a virtual webinar held just a few days ago on VAT, including the Northern Ireland border issues. I will admit that I could not follow large chunks of it, but it was easy to draw two conclusions. The first is that this is a real Bermuda triangle, with intense complexity embedded in it. Any business will be taking a real risk if it does not get expert advice to be able to cope, and that will be really challenging, especially for smaller and medium-sized businesses. The other conclusion one came to, which was a happy thought for those involved in the webinar, was that VAT experts had been given job security for life with the complexities that will arise.

We in this House have no say in the future of this Bill, but it is one that touches on serious issues that will shape the future of Northern Ireland and of our union. Despite that limitation, I hope that we will continue to follow these issues. We need to continue to hold the Government to account.