Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Wirral and Baroness Kramer

3rd reading & Report stage
Monday 19th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I again draw attention to my interests as set out in the register, particularly as an independent non-executive director of LINK.

In speaking to an earlier amendment, I touched on the challenges of financial exclusion. The problem is complex and the answer, in so far as there is one, is never going to be simple. However, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond, particularly on his vision in seeing a way to at least meet the problem that he so clearly set out. I welcome word that the Government propose to act along the lines set out in this amendment and the subsequent one to help create greater flexibility in access to cash. Of course we all accept that financial services require regulation, but that regulation should always be proportionate, not stifling.

In some respects we have been fortunate in the past year. Not only have food supplies been maintained, but our digital infrastructure held up remarkably well, despite the increased demands on it. Imagine if it had not—if the internet had crashed for a few days or our banking system had cracked and digital payments had failed. I believe there would then have been rather less talk of cash being a thing of the past.

The principal theme of recent months has been resilience, which demands diversity and innovation. The amendment, and my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond’s vision and thinking behind it, perfectly captures that.

For the foreseeable future, cash will continue to be a vital medium of exchange for millions of people. The viability of our system for providing access to cash is therefore a necessity, not a luxury. I pay tribute also to the foresight and leadership shown by my noble friend Lord True. These decisions demand innovation and flexibility, and the kind of thinking captured by my noble friend’s amendment will be vital. I know that everyone involved in the payment system will be very supportive.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, on reading Amendment 37D I think I recognised some of the distinct phraseology to denote an expert hand in its drafting, so I am exceedingly hopeful that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, has been effective in persuading the Government that this is language they can accept and live with.

Of course, I join in all the calls to make sure that access to cash remains. Despite Covid and all the pressures that have encouraged people to change to digital and electronic payments, 5 million people have stuck to cash, and those people deserve to be served as much as anyone else. Indeed, the point made by noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that digital systems can always go down and that you had better have a back-up, did not occur to me but strikes me as fundamentally important.

My concern is this: I hope the Government do not think this is all they need to do and that this is part of a broader programme of ensuring access to cash. I spoke to quite a number of the storekeepers in my local area. It is a mixed area, with a lot of wealthy and middle-class people but also many people living on a former council estate, now housing association. Among that range, quite a number of people, for a whole variety of reasons, still want to use cash—but I could not find a single shop that would be willing to do cashback without a purchase. In fact, they did not want to do cashback with a purchase in most instances, simply because they did not want to have the cash on the premises, especially at night. Frankly, because of all the various bank branch closures, it would be at least a 35 to 40-minute drive to get to a place where you could deposit the cash overnight. Then you would have to collect it in the morning, which of course would make no sense because most of the shops would be open before the bank was available to hand it over.

Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Wirral and Baroness Kramer

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 22nd February 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as set out in the register. I recognise that these are probing amendments, but I exhort my noble friend the Minister not to underestimate either the strength of feeling on the question of international competitiveness or its importance to a sector vital to our economic recovery, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe stressed in her impressive speech earlier in this debate. The foundation stone for the regulation of financial services is still FiSMA—the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000—albeit in a form substantially amended by subsequent legislation. As the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, reminded us, the regulatory structure is currently subject to a fundamental review.

The financial services future regulatory framework review and phase 2 consultation closed at the end of last week. The early indications of a general direction of travel are welcome. The original version of FSMA set out those four clear objectives for the new Financial Services Authority, the FSA: market confidence; public awareness; the protection of consumers; and the reduction of financial crime. In addition, the FSA was required to have regard to a number of other considerations, which included such obvious factors as efficiency, proportionality and innovation. They also included, as the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, reminded us—and I quote verbatim

“the international character of financial services and markets and the desirability of maintaining the competitive position of the United Kingdom”

and

“the need to minimise the adverse effects on competition that may arise from anything done in the discharge of those functions”.

As other speakers have reminded us, after the crash of 2008, the incoming coalition Government inherited a severe recession and an unstable and untenable financial situation. They therefore undertook a deep consideration of regulation. In the debates in another place on what became the Financial Services Act 2012, concerns were repeatedly expressed to the effect that regulation under the FSMA had been not so much light touch as soft touch. Since 2012, the entire financial services sector, broad and diverse as it is, has effectively been punished—put into the naughty corner, as it were —almost entirely because of the alleged failures of the banks. The regulatory brush used was simply too broad and therefore not fit for purpose. The requirement to take account of international competitiveness was jettisoned because, it was argued, it might dilute the robustness of regulation.

I have also taken a close look at the Second Reading debate on the then Financial Services Bill, on 11 June 2012, in which one colleague after another raised this question of competitiveness, including my noble friends Lord Trenchard, Lord Hodgson and Lady Noakes. So this is a “Groundhog Day” debate, but I hope no less persuasive for that. My noble friend Lord Trenchard certainly wins a prize for consistency and constancy, because he eloquently argued that day:

“Some of us believed that competition and the competitiveness of our financial markets should have been made an objective of the FSA rather than merely one of the principles to which it had to have regard. I welcome the fact that the FCA is given a competition objective in the Bill, but it is inadequate in that it falls short of a responsibility to maintain or enhance the competitiveness of the UK’s financial markets”.—[Official Report, 11/6/12; col. 1245.]


As both the Association of British Insurers and the London Market Group have rightly pointed out, promoting the international competitiveness of the UK financial services sector to nurture its contribution to our economic strength must now be restored to the objectives of the regulators. This would bring our regulators into line with other, competitor jurisdictions, such as Hong Kong, the United States, Singapore and Australia. In its phase 2 consultation paper, the Government explicitly acknowledge:

“A gap in the original FSMA model is that, while it set high-level general objectives and principles, it did not provide for government and Parliament to set the policy approach for specific areas of financial services regulation.”


A move towards increasingly activity-specific regulatory principles is helpfully adumbrated, as my noble friend Lord Blackwell pointed out, ahead of the outcome of the FRF consultation, in Schedule 3 to the Bill. This would require the PRA, when considering capital requirements regulation, to have regard to

“the likely effect of the rules on the relative standing of the United Kingdom as a place for internationally active credit institutions and investment firms to be based or to carry on activities.”

This seems a welcome step back towards an old principle and, quite possibly, a Rubicon of significance crossed—or, more accurately, re-crossed. On that basis the Bill, while welcome in its own terms, is merely the beginning of a vital process which will determine the character of the post-Brexit UK financial services sector, potentially for a generation or more.

Once the results of the consultation have been digested, I hope to see far more acknowledgement in regulation of the great differences that exist between different elements of financial services, along with an explicit recognition that our international competitiveness matters. It is entirely spurious to claim that a regulator mindful of international competitiveness is likely to be a weak regulator. It could and should be a very effective one indeed.

As the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, has just pointed out, our competitiveness relies on our strength. Our greatest strength is surely our reputation for providing the best advice and the best products at the best price, something no regulatory race to the bottom could ever deliver. If we really have the ambition to become the global centre for insurance and financial services—a realistic ambition, I argue, if we work together to deliver upon it—then we simply must get this right. I very much hope that the Bill does not go down as a missed opportunity.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, inevitably with so many amendments to one Bill, this group is something of an omnibus collection. I have some sympathy with some of them—for example, the country-by-country reporting amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. While I disagree very much with the noble Lords, Lord Hodgson and Lord Holmes, on their overall support for an international competitiveness objective in other areas, they are pointing out a need for the regulator to look again at issues such as proportionality and how to adapt to the new digital world. However, that does not seem to need to be put into law. This is really advice to the regulator, and I hope that they will take a great deal of that good advice on board.

I want to reply to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, because he echoed an opinion raised by the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, but very effectively countered by my noble friend Lady Bowles. He talked about activity-specific regulation creating the opportunity for some significant divergence in the regulatory environment. The lesson of 2008 was that the financial services sector is linked systemically. As my noble friend Lady Bowles pointed out, the crash in 2008 started with largely fake and junk mortgages in the United States. It worked its way into various securities instruments that were sold to people in the UK who did not understand them, but should have.

The underpinning consequences of risk were also completely misunderstood. The way that derivatives were traded and structured created a potential risk of losing liquidity overnight. This is exactly what happened with the high street banks in the UK. They became competitive with others in the financial sector to develop the kinds of profits that they saw being made by rival companies, pushed their credit standards to the point where, frankly, they were no longer standards, and chose methods of funding themselves that made them vulnerable to any volatility in the overnight markets. This is not an industry in which we can separate the different pieces into silos. They are all interlinked and that must underpin any form of regulation that we have.

Bank of England and Financial Services Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Wirral and Baroness Kramer

Wednesday 11th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

I hope that the noble Lord will not mind if I try to avoid following him down that route. I hope that noble Lords will understand that my objection is that I dislike in any event the reverse burden of proof. I welcome the fact that it is to be abolished, but I want to send a message that the financial services industry should be composed of people who put the customer, the consumer and the client first and observe the highest possible principles both professionally and in the standards they seek to maintain.

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords, I do not mean to be in any way offensive to the noble Lord, but we cannot afford to be naive. We were naive for decades and in that period significant abuse took place. I am not talking just about a failure to make proper credit decisions. If we look at RBS, we can see that it lost money the old-fashioned way. It made very foolish loans and abandoned appropriate credit standards. You could call that incompetence rather than venality. But what of money laundering, LIBOR mis-selling and PPI mis-selling? These were not failures of competence; they were quite deliberate abuses of the customer on an industrial scale, year after year after year. The assumption that all the people engaged in those activities have either changed who they are or have left the industry is, may I suggest to him, naive?

Part of the underlying problem is that so much money is at stake here. For senior people who turn their eyes away from abuse, there are very substantial financial rewards. As we have seen, even when there are some penalties such as clawback, they are only a small proportion of extraordinary rewards. We are in a situation where the risk is high if abuse continues. I understand the noble Lord’s concerns over the reverse burden of proof, and I do not support it lightly, but as my noble friend Lord Sharkey said, we have on the statute book at least 10 or 11 other Acts, frequently supported by Members of this House, which have decided that the reverse burden of proof is necessary because it is the only way for the law to be effective.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

I am not sure that I am supposed to try to answer the noble Baroness. Perhaps I may just say that if she examines her basic beliefs, she will agree with me that the presumption of innocence is a fundamental human right. I suppose we disagree because the noble Baroness would like to see a two-tier system. I find that very difficult to justify.

I revert back to my view that complementary self-regulation is the way forward. If the trust and confidence that the public had in the financial services industry is to be restored, the message has to go out to the industry that, rather than be subjected to even tougher statutory rules and regulations, the time has come for it to take the lead and determine how its businesses are to be run in the interests of the customer. I hope that that will be the message that goes out from this debate.