Financial Services and Markets Bill

Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Lilley

Committee stage
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I am sure that the regulators have provided some of those views already. For example, they gave evidence during the Commons Committee stage of this Bill. I do not want to speak for them but I absolutely undertake to the Committee to seek that from the regulators, and obviously it will be down to them as to how they wish to deal with the request. With that, I hope that noble Lords will not press their amendments.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating and valuable debate, the highlight of which was obviously the agreement between my noble friend Lady Noakes and the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, on the disproportionality of the PRA. Another common feature of the whole debate was that everyone seemed to express concern about the lack of accountability of the regulators. I was encouraged by the Minister’s remark that she would look positively at the debate.

I am grateful for the support of my noble friends Lord Trenchard, Lord Naseby, Lord Sandhurst, Lord Roborough and Lord Holmes for the amendments that stand in my name. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyrie, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, for applying their critical faculties to the amendments that we tabled. I will consider carefully what they said. It will be easier for me to respond when I can actually read the text rather than doing so immediately now—anyway, I only have time for a few words now—but I think I can assure them that the amendments would not require new rules to be predictable from old, existing rules, nor would they forbid new rules that were inconsistent with existing rules; it would just have to be explicit that they overrode an existing rule—although I may have misunderstood what they said.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, mentioned that she is worried about excessive powers to lawyers and litigation. I am in the unusual position of being in alliance with lawyers. I got into trouble early in my parliamentary career by quoting

“let’s kill all the lawyers”

in a debate in which it turned out that I was the only non-lawyer. I think we have to recognise that the only alternative to the common law approach which we seek to entrench here, which is the purpose of the Bill, is the codified approach, which is very much more rigid and unable to respond quickly to the rapidly varying world to which the noble Baroness rightly referred, or simple discretion which may not lead to being capricious, but does mean that it is very unpredictable for practitioners who do not know how rules are going to be applied. I will, of course, withdraw the amendment, but I hope we will return to these issues on later groups and perhaps on Report.

Stock Markets

Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Lilley

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I am so glad that the right reverend Prelate has given me a chance to set out what the Government are doing. The Financial Services and Markets Bill has just completed its work in Commons Committee, setting forward a whole range of reforms to inherited EU law to make us more competitive. He also mentioned the environment. The Government’s ambition is to make London the premier place for green finance, to ensure that our financial markets take into account the challenge of climate change, so that we then can ensure that we are pursuing green growth across the whole of our economy.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, having lived and worshipped for nearly 40 years in the diocese of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, I have benefited greatly over the years from the spiritual advice that I have received from his predecessors and my local clergy. But is my noble friend aware that this is the first time I have ever heard a bishop of the Church of England complain that the stock market is not high enough? Is that because the bishops have ceased to worry about spreading Christianity and now propose the worship of Mammon, or is it simply a delayed anti-Brexit point, which is not the role of the bishops?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I cannot speak for the right reverend Prelate but he mentioned two things. One was ensuring green growth, which I have addressed, and the other was workers and jobs. Maybe he knows that there are 2.3 million jobs supported by the financial services sector, with two-thirds of these outside London in finance hubs including Birmingham.

Deprived Areas

Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Lilley

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, clinical validation is, at its heart, about adapting to the need to manage larger and longer waiting lists and tackle those. Patients will be treated in order of clinical priority and then by length of wait to reduce the harm by waiting. But I reassure the noble Lord that his point is very well made and that, in the NHS recovery plan, there are eight actions to reduce inequalities in the restoration of services, including reporting on providing services to the poorest 20% of neighbourhoods and black and Asian patients.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Was my noble friend rather surprised that she had to get to page 94 of the summary before there was any mention of obesity as a cause of inequalities in health, given that it is one of the major things that both undermines health over time and has exacerbated susceptibility to mortality from Covid?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, being somewhat familiar with Professor Marmot’s work, I know it is incredibly wide-ranging and looks at a huge number of the determinants of health. But my noble friend is absolutely right that obesity is a big part of our health agenda, which is why the Government have set out a number of areas where we will take further action to support people to reduce levels of obesity across the country.

Economy: Bank of England Forecasts

Debate between Baroness Penn and Lord Lilley

Wednesday 13th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn]

The Bank of England and the OBR have made it clear that what they have produced are scenarios rather than forecasts. The Bank of England’s scenario certainly took into account the effect of this pandemic on levels of global trade.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, the Bank’s report makes it clear that the construction sector has been hard-hit by the lockdown. It is vital to revive it, since it generates activity across the economy. Given that we have learned that regulators can, under public pressure to respond to the crisis, greatly accelerate their normal decision-making processes without sacrificing standards, will the Government urge all planning authorities to speed up decision-making on planning applications immediately so that we can get Britain building again?

[Baroness Penn]

We are keen that all planning decisions are made in a timely way. Construction is one of the sectors where we have provided Covid-secure guidance to allow people to get back to work, safe in the knowledge that they will be returning to safe workplaces.