Financial Services Bill

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Monday 8th October 2012 Lords Chamber

Debate on whether Clause 6 should stand part of the Bill.

[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for not having formally given notice that I wish to speak on Clause 6 standing part of the Bill. I discovered my omission only at the weekend, but I have ascertained that it is in order for me to speak at this point and I have informed the Minister’s officials, so the Minister should be forearmed. I apologise also to my noble friend Lord Stewartby—had he seen that I wished to debate whether Clause 6 should stand part of the Bill, he might not have digressed earlier into the issues I wish to raise. I also apologise if there is a little repetition of what my noble friend said earlier in what I am about to say.

I want to talk about the timetable for the transfer of credit regulation activities from the OFT to the FCA which is effected by Clause 6. The issue is not the fact of the transfer—about which I do not think there is any serious concern—but the timing of the changes. I should say that these issues have been raised by the Finance and Leasing Association and I am grateful for its briefing. As I understand it, the Government wish to go live with the FCA taking responsibility with effect from April 2014. They wish at that date to transfer as much as possible of the Consumer Credit Act and the OFT’s related guidance into a new rulebook issued by the FCA under FiSMA, as amended by the Bill. This is causing problems to the industry because the new rulebook will not be consulted on until the second half of 2013, with the final rules available only in March 2014. That simply gives the industry too little time to gear up for going live one month later. This is partly a question of time—the industry obviously has to make sure that its processes, its systems and, of course, its staff are prepared for any changes that come out of a new rulebook. I am sure that the Minister will agree that while a lot of preparation can happen during a consultation period, companies cannot deliver final changes until they are clear about what the final changes will be—if, indeed, there are any. One month, as I have said, seems excessively and unreasonably tight.

In addition, the conversion of the existing rules and guidance might not be as simple as it seems on the surface. Consumer protection under FiSMA and the Consumer Credit Act start from slightly different positions. A lot of FiSMA is about protecting depositors and investors from losing their money when the organisations to which they have entrusted their funds get into difficulty. The Consumer Credit Act places a different kind of risk on the lender—it is starting from a different end of the process. The Consumer Credit Act guidance has been built up over a very considerable period of time—more than 30 years. The concerns are about the sheer time that it would take to convert a pre-existing regime into a new one.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, I do not like to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Davies, but this is not the first time that recruitment consultants have been debated in your Lordships’ House. I recall more than one occasion when we had a discussion of the role of recruitment consultants in the levels of pay within the financial sector and more generally, but before the noble Lord joined your Lordships’ House. It is a subject which has previously arisen and I am sure that if the noble Lord searches Hansard he will find earlier debates.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, I daresay I stand corrected. I am delighted to hear that I was wrong in that respect.

[Baroness Noakes]

More broadly, I think everybody accepts that executive pay has some problems attached to it. I do not wish to dismiss the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, out of hand, although it will not surprise him to find that I do not support his amendments. I do not support them because they come close to interfering in the corporate governance model, which broadly serves the UK extremely well. The corporate governance model has boards which are responsible for making decisions, and these boards have committees of boards, including remuneration committees, which are responsible to those boards. To insert somebody who is not a board member outwith the context of having employee representatives on the board starts to change that dynamic. Similarly, if you have remuneration consultants who should be reporting independently to the remuneration committee being appointed by the shareholders, it is difficult to see what the relationship then is to the board and the board’s committees. There are a lot of problems in the solutions that have come up.

Remuneration is under huge scrutiny. There have been proposals from BIS in the last few years, and the regulatory ratchet has been increased with greater intensity. The involvement of the FSA, for example, in banking and other financial institution regulations, is not minor, and equally with regulators in other parts of the world. So we may have a problem which almost certainly will not be addressed by the amendments before us and which already has a lot of moving parts.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way a second time. I wanted to rise to agree with her. She is absolutely right. You should never put on a remuneration committee someone who is not a member of the board. The remuneration committee must be a sub-committee of the board, and it was in the context of employee representatives being fully members of the board in every possible sense, that I put forward my suggestion.

[Baroness Noakes]

I am pleased to see that we are in agreement. Finally, I was concerned whether or not the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, thought that his amendment meant that all listed companies would be dealt with by the PRA and the FCA, because I do not think they have powers to deal with other than those bodies that are within the regulatory net, so it would only cover a relatively small proportion of his target.

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, my noble friend has made the first point that I would make. The noble Lords, Lord Davies of Oldham and Lord Davies of Stamford, talked as if we were debating provisions that related to all listed companies, but my noble friend is completely right that this section does not apply to great global companies such as Vinci and others. Although it relates to an important group of companies, it is related essentially to authorised persons.

The Bill allows regulators to make rules regarding the role of employees in relation to remuneration committees and, in theory, the requirement that remuneration consultants be appointed by shareholders if they think that such rules would advance their objectives. However, I accept that, in practice, it is uncertain that that test would be met, particularly in the latter instance. In any case, other appropriate processes are already in place to consider these questions in the context of wider corporate governance reform—which, again, is precisely the point that my noble friend makes. This is a wider series of issues.

It is important to be reminded that, in January this year, the Department for Business published its response to its consultation on executive remuneration, which considered among others, the possibility of giving employees a say on remuneration. Although I do not want to be drawn into a wider debate—we should focus on financial services—the consultation responses nevertheless illuminate what would be appropriate or, as I would say, inappropriate for financial services businesses alone.

The Government’s view is that, while there will be qualified and enthusiastic employees willing to take on such a role, there are strong arguments against this proposal, including—on this I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford—that members of the remuneration committee need to be full board members if they are to understand the overall financial strategy and the wider business and economic context which impact on remuneration policy; that introducing external representatives on a single committee risks obscuring directors’ collective responsibility, as well as potentially creating additional tensions, which might reduce the effectiveness of the UK unitary board model; and that the level of responsibility of employee representatives and the possible conflicts of interest they might face would need to be resolved.

As a result of the BIS consultation on executive pay, the Government have decided to proceed with some key reforms, such as the introduction of a binding shareholder vote on remuneration, but the case for requiring companies to include employees on remuneration committees has not been made, and the Government are certainly not going to make or accept it in the narrower context that we are discussing today.