Financial Services and Markets Bill

Debate between Baroness Sheehan and Lord Randall of Uxbridge

Report stage
Tuesday 6th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 15, so ably introduced and supported by others. I will speak principally to Amendment 91, to which I added my name. I tabled a similar amendment in Committee, but unfortunately ill health prevented me speaking then. I was grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for taking over the reins then and I am very happy to support her now.

I support the Government’s amendment in as far as it goes. As we have heard, the Government have made a lot of strides in this area through public finance commitments. Only last month the Prime Minister met with the President of Brazil, pledging £80 million to the Amazon Fund to help stop deforestation. There is more money coming through; at least £3 billion of our international climate finance is devoted to nature protection and restoration.

The question we must ask ourselves is: are we turning a blind eye to the private finance undoing all this good? Preventing private finance doing harm is just as important as the aid we provide. As we have heard, the Government have endorsed this conclusion by pioneering the Glasgow declaration on forests and land use, which includes a commitment to:

“Facilitate the alignment of financial flows with international goals to reverse forest loss and degradation”.


Now is the very time to make good on this pledge and get our own house in order.

This is a sensible proposal rooted in Schedule 17 to the Environment Act and limited to illegal deforestation for that very reason. The amendment itself has been publicly endorsed, as we have heard, by Sir Ian Cheshire, as well as financial institutions representing more than £1 trillion in assets under management and advice, including Rathbone Greenbank Investments, Federated Hermes Ltd and the Local Government Pension Scheme Central Ltd—so it is not just the usual suspects.

At the G7 last month, the UK committed to take steps to redirect finance away from activities causing biodiversity loss “without delay”. I am very grateful to the Minister. As we heard from my noble friend Lord Caithness, she has bent over backwards to try to help and is committed to this. She has not quite convinced me that the Government should not accept this sensible amendment. I hope that it will be accepted and that the Government will follow through here. As I have got older, I may have got mellower but I have got more impatient. I am fed up with hearing every time that it will be in the next Bill.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I rise on behalf of our Benches in support of these amendments. In doing so, I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet.

Before I move on to the bulk of the amendments in this group, I will address government Amendment 4. I agree with noble Lords across the House who have welcomed it but feel that it is deflective and a little weak. The policy statements required from the Treasury may be followed by the regulators, but it just does not go far enough. It certainly does not fulfil the spirit of Amendment 114 on SDRs, spoken to so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft.

In the briefings I have received on this Bill to make provision about the regulation of financial services and markets, it struck me that the phrase “systemic risk” appears frequently. According to the Systemic Risk Centre, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science:

“Systemic risk refers to the risk of a breakdown of an entire system rather than simply the failure of individual parts. In a financial context, it captures the risk of a cascading failure in the financial sector, caused by interlinkages within the financial system, resulting in a severe economic downturn”.


I think we all recognise that scenario.

Therefore, the amendments in this group all aim to strengthen the Government’s hand either by aiming for better governance in financial services and markets or by pre-empting disastrous practices as financial services and markets transform and orientate towards a future that encompasses our net-zero ambitions. Deep change of this nature is a risky undertaking for the sector that the Government can act to mitigate. Indeed, the Government can act to enforce their own policy statements, as so many noble Lords across the Chamber have already mentioned.

I will briefly address the amendments to which I have added my name. Amendment 7 addresses an essential element of openness and transparency and would require the FCA to make rules to mandate fund managers and insurers to give information to clients and beneficiaries on the exercise of all voting rights on their behalf by appointed investment managers. The noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, in whose name the amendment appears, has already given us chapter and verse on why this would be a sensible move by the Government. Currently, it is difficult for underlying fund managers and insurers to access information about how voting rights in investee companies are being exercised on their behalf in a consistent and comparable format. I will give just two examples and, I hope, not repeat too much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, has already said. This is very important.

Reporting is currently voluntary and contained in a single dense report across the whole of the fund manager or insurer’s operations. That is problematic, because in practice it means that pension funds will find it difficult or impossible to identify whether their pension fund is invested in that share. They cannot get at the information they need. That is one shortcoming; the other is that the reporting is non-standardised. Many investment managers disclose votes in a non-standardised way in long PDF reports—sometimes up to 10,000 pages—which makes it extremely difficult for pension funds to extract the data they need out of it.

The aim of Amendment 7 is to rectify these shortcomings and others that have already been mentioned, and requires the FCA to make rules requiring information on the exercise of voting rights to be disclosed on request and in a standard format. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has a regularly updated standard reporting template which managers must follow. The FCA should achieve parity with the USA on voter reporting and enable consistent and comprehensive vote disclosure. Voting at AGMs is a key tool in ensuring good corporate governance, good long-term investor returns and good economic outcomes more broadly, and is key to government realising its policy ambitions, not least its net-zero ambitions. Indeed, HMT has publicly acknowledged that good voting and good vote reporting are crucial to meeting net zero. Finally, as the Aldersgate Group identifies in its 2022 report, it is critical that financial institutions engage with systemic risks via stewardship—such as exercising voting rights—rather than managing portfolios by divesting from high-carbon assets.

Amendment 15, which adds nature to the new regulatory principle on net-zero emissions, is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and was spoken to ably by her. We have only to gaze and wonder at the efficiency of bees and other pollinators in their role in providing us with good food. Various estimates have put a figure verging on £1 billion to pollinators’ contribution to the UK economy in terms of worth of crops they produce. However, if one inputs human labour in their stead, we know that their value is far greater than that.

The Government’s own green finance strategy, published just a few weeks ago, stated:

“Nature sustains economies and livelihoods, and protecting and restoring nature is inseparable from addressing climate change”,


which completely echoes what the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said. The funny thing is that those are the Government’s own words, so why do the Government balk at this amendment? In their response to the seminal Dasgupta review, The Economics of Biodiversity, which has already been mentioned, the Government committed to delivering a nature-positive future by reversing nature loss, and to

“leave the environment in a better state than we found it”.

This amendment is urgently needed. Current investments are working against nature and driving nature’s depletion. We have heard these figures before but they are worth reiterating. In 2019, financial institutions provided $2.6 trillion in loans and underwriting services to sectors identified as primary drivers of biodiversity loss and ecosystem disruption. Globally, Governments spend $500 billion per year that is potentially harmful to biodiversity.

Nature loss can be massively detrimental to investments and must be considered in assessing risks. I will give a couple of examples. First, shareholders lost billions when the European pharmaceutical company Bayer lost near 40% of its market capitalisation in less than a year after acquiring an agrochemical company accused of adversely affecting honeybee populations. Secondly, company shares in the Canadian gold-mining company Infinito Gold fell 50% when in 2012 the Costa Rican Government denied permission to develop a mine due to potential impacts on forests and endangered species.

In conclusion, we need investment in nature restoration to be commensurate with investment in net zero—here I disagree a little with what the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, said. In having similar amounts and similar resources deployed on net zero and climate change, we are able to protect our natural capital, which we must do if we are to meet our net-zero targets. Nature and climate change are two sides of the same coin. I hope that when the time comes, noble Lords will give this worthy amendment their full support, as we will from these Benches.