Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord May of Oxford

Wednesday 18th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord May of Oxford]

I shall make a couple of comments in favour of the amendment. As I understand it, its general sense is to state that there is a duty of care. The medical profession and the legal profession have an explicit duty of care. An interesting seminar brought together economists, lawyers and philosophers in Oxford over the past year and a half, working towards trying to say something sensible about this. As I understand it, the amendment is intended to say that, of course, we have to understand that there are risks, but that we know of specific examples where customers have had cheerfully and aggressively marketed to them investment instruments that the vendor itself, Goldman Sachs, was betting against. The gist of the amendment—and other things that I would like to be in the Bill in a much more explicit and in-your-face way—is to assert that there should be a real duty of care.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment, as I said when speaking to my noble friend’s amendment a few minutes ago. There is a real danger of failing to distinguish between risk and fraud. They get intermingled in the public’s mind. Clearly, fraud is absolutely unacceptable and needs to be chased down and prosecuted with all possible vigour. Too often, in this compensation-culture era, a risk that goes wrong is seen as fraud: “I should not have lost money”. One difficulty with the interesting concept, proposed by the noble Lord, of duty of care is that although you can explain very clearly to people the risks that they are taking, when it does not happen as you and they hope—things are volatile—they are inclined to forget that they were given the appropriate warnings. Our emphasis must be on making sure that risk is understood; and that fraud is unacceptable; but that the two are completely distinct. There is a confluence in the public mind, sometimes encouraged by the way that the newspapers report it, of two issues. There are plenty of cases where fraud has happened—that is wrong—but there are also cases where people have taken risks which they anticipated would deliver them huge returns. When they did not, because they were highly risky, they did not see themselves in any way responsible; they sought someone else to blame.