Draft Financial Services (Miscellaneous) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 3) Regulations 2019

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2019 General Committees

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Edward.

I agree very much with the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde. This is chaos. It should not be happening that we are in this room again, with hours to go before Parliament is prorogued, to correct mistakes that we were assured would already have been picked up. The last time that we were in this room discussing similar business, the Minister said, “Oh, these things happen. Errors happen when drafting legislation,” yet here we are again, closer and closer still to another Brexit deadline, with a raft of things that the Government have not got quite right. How were these errors identified? Is it just that the Treasury had slightly more time to mark its own homework, so it was able to go through the measures and find what it had previously missed, or were the errors brought to the Department’s attention by some other means? It would be interesting to know if they were picked up by external organisations, which realised that what had been put in front of them would not actually work or was not fit for purpose.

It is interesting to look at all these things. I am still not quite sure that we have seen the end of all the statutory instruments, with Prorogation coming up tonight. Hon. Members may not have been here for business questions on Thursday, when the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) asked what would happen about statutory instruments, because they do not fall in the same way as legislation falls with Prorogation. The Leader of the House said:

“On the ability to leave on 31 October, all the legislation that is needed is in place. We have 580 statutory instruments to make sure it will all happen smoothly. That is all done. It is ready. It is prepared. Her Majesty’s Government have been a model of efficiency and efficacy in preparing this. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is perhaps one of the most impressive administrative Ministers this country has ever seen.”—[Official Report, 5 September 2019; Vol. 664, c. 394.]

But we have all these corrections—pages and pages of corrections to statutory instruments that the Minister has already laid and the House approved in good faith because we were told that it was the right and appropriate thing to do. Despite the Opposition’s protestations that we needed to look at them in greater detail, that we needed more time and that the process needed to be better, this is what we have. The Government cannot say that they were not warned.

To pick up just one concern, relating to the Markets in Financial Instruments (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, this instrument would appear to suggest that the UK share trading obligations can be met through trades of UK systemic internalisers but not of EU systemic internalisers. Is there a risk of reduced regulation? My concern has always been that we cannot have less regulation as we come out of the EU. Since the financial crash, more regulation and more safety has been put in place in the system. We cannot end up with less robust systems in place in any of these areas.

The Minister talked about fixing deficiencies in new technical standards as they come from the EU. Perhaps he can tell us in a bit more detail what that process will look like. Will we forever be scrambling to catch up with the EU as we make regulations and become rule takers? I am sure all the Brexiteers in the room would rail against that. We will be trying to fix all these deficiencies in the desperate attempt to continue to have a functioning financial services industry in this country. We will continually be trailing behind the EU and trying to patch up our systems, rather than being the integral part of building the systems that we once were. That looks to me like how this will be.

Will the Minister give further detail about the PRA and an appropriate date? Does he have an appropriate date in mind. April was suggested in earlier drafts of the legislation, when we thought we would leave in March. What will the date be if there is a no-deal Brexit at the end of next month?

This whole process has been, as I think the Minister said previously, sub-optimal. It continues to be sub-optimal. We will rue some of the decisions we have come to. There is a huge financial services sector in Scotland—in Glasgow—that does a huge amount of skilled work and gives people good, high-quality jobs. If it is harder for those people in those jobs in Glasgow, Edinburgh and everywhere else to do the work they have so diligently been doing, it will be to the cost of all of us. I will do all I can to see that that does not happen.