Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Noakes

Monday 8th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, it is distasteful to equate what happened in the Abortion Act with what we are dealing with here, which is two people coming together to formalise their loving relationship under law. We are talking about two completely different things. We are accustomed in this House to legislating on the basis of evidence. We have heard no evidence that this amendment is needed. I am sure that if registrars out there wanted this amendment they would have been flushed out by now. We have heard evidence to the contrary. The National Panel for Registration thinks that this is neither necessary nor desirable. This is another attempt to undermine the status of marriage being created by this Bill and which I support.

[Lord Deben]

I really do think that my noble friend has to withdraw that. I have fought in favour of same-sex marriage the whole way through. I am not trying to undermine it. I am standing up for toleration. Toleration, even if it is for two people, is worth while.

[Baroness Noakes]

I accept what my noble friend says about his position, but I do not think it is the position of those who put forward the amendment.

Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Noakes

Monday 12th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes]

I added my name to this amendment because my noble friend has raised some important issues, and I support everything he said. When approaching consumer protection, it is often easy to want to insure or underpin the consumer in every possible way, but we have to have a market in which financial service providers can be confident that when they provide a financial product, whether it is a mortgage, an ISA or an insurance or pension product, they know the risks they are undertaking in relation to that. Understanding the balance that will be taken by the FCA when approaching its consumer protection objective is extremely important to the financial services industry. If the financial service industry gets very unconfident about how this will play out in practice, we will end up with a worse outcome for consumers because it is almost certain that the range of products and the degree of financial innovation that will be invested in would decline. It will not happen immediately, but it will decline over time because firms will not be confident about how they can approach them.

The financial service industry reads very carefully what the people involved in regulation say about these things. The FSA recently put out a document dealing with the direction for the new FCA. It was very useful to be updated how those in the part of the FSA which is migrating to the FCA developed their thinking. In the introduction to that document, Mr Martin Wheatley, who will be the chief executive of the FCA, said:

“We expect a mortgage that is affordable”.

That sounds like an uncontroversial statement, until you think that that might mean that a variable rate mortgage could never be provided to a consumer if it were at all possible that plausible fluctuations in the interest rate could end up with some kind of consumer detriment. We might end up closing off certain products that would benefit consumers because the firm cannot be confident that the standard by which it would be judged will allow it to provide those products safely. The issues raised by my noble friend are extremely important, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I refer again to my declaration of interests. I understand the reason for this amendment, but it seems not the right way to achieve its end. To suggest that you have to balance protection on the one hand with access on the other seems a misunderstanding of what protection ought to be. I am sorry that the Government have so far been unwilling to place upon the regulator a responsibility to have regard to the extent to which advice is available. That ought to be part of what the regulator does when he thinks about how he is going to regulate and the demands that he is going to make. There is a real argument that we are going to find that there will be fewer opportunities for those of modest means to get proper advice. It is important for the regulator to take that into account when he lays burdens upon the industry. I think that is right, but I am sure that this is not the way to achieve that end, partly because it does not help the industry to suggest that somehow or other protection for consumers is necessarily contrary to the need to provide for a wider range of people to have advice. The failure to get this right has been one of the problems with the industry in the past.

I hope that the Minister will resist this amendment, but that he will do so recognising that there is a real concern behind it, which is that the cost of regulation and the degree to which regulation is disproportionate falls most on those who most need advice and very often are not in receipt of a great income and do not have large reserves. I hope that the Minister will accept that there is a concern here. It is one that the Government have failed properly to address, and it is not well addressed by suggesting that there is a kind of conflict where conflict does not necessarily occur.