Draft Financial Services (Miscellaneous) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2019 General Committees

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is doing a very good job of explaining the complexities of unravelling a 46-year-old union. What does she think would be the complexities of unravelling a 300-year-old Union?

[Alison Thewliss]

It certainly would not start from here. The Brexiteers have started with no plan, nothing written down, no objectives, and no sense of where they want to arrive at, without even agreement among themselves about what they want to achieve. I will take no lectures from the hon. Gentleman on how we do negotiations, because this is a complete and utter shambles. I suppose it is no accident that we can look at the figures from EY, which says that since the 2016 referendum financial services firms have voted with their wallets and moved $1 trillion of assets from the UK to the rest of the EU—to their benefit, and certainly not to ours.

The financial services industry in Scotland is looking at the situation with a sense of disbelief and horror. Representatives come and ask me what is going to happen, and I cannot tell them. The Minister cannot tell them. The Prime Minister will no doubt be out of the door in a couple of days’ time, and she cannot tell them. What kind of confidence can the industry have that there will be a stable financial regime going forward, if we cannot even get these SIs correct? The other day, the Minister could not even tell my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) whether the UK would break even at any point in this process. We will lose out as a result of Brexit, and she could not say when the UK economy will start to improve after all this disruption.

A number of the changes to the SIs—described in paragraphs 7.10 to 7.13 of the explanatory memorandum —are designed to improved consumer protection and increase consumer awareness where firms are in transitional regimes. That is quite a worrying omission. Had this not been brought to light, people who might rely on those types of consumer protection would not have had them under this SI, and perhaps under others. We simply do not know. We have raised concerns that industry has brought to us, when we have been able to do so.

This SI has gone through in a very haphazard manner, which is certainly concerning. The issues and concerns have been well iterated by the Opposition, but I want to ask the Minister about the procedure and process to ensure that all the other SIs that we have wheeched through the House in no time at all are as rigorous as they should be. It is deeply unfortunate that he has had to come back and do this today. I feel very sorry for his having to do it, and for the civil servants who have had to go through the process as well, but there must be a better process than this. The corrective process should be better than this. I would say that we are heading for chaos, but we are already in chaos. It gives Scotland no confidence that this UK Government are the strong and stable environment that we were always promised they were. I seek assurances from the Minister on what is being done to address these issues.