Financial Services Contracts (Transitional and Saving Provision) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Lords Chamber

In summary, the Government believe that the proposed legislation is necessary to ensure that existing contractual obligations can continue to be met, thereby avoiding disruption and losses for UK businesses and consumers in the event that the UK leaves the EU without a deal or an implementation period. I hope that this explanation is helpful and that noble Lords will join me in supporting this measure, which I beg to move.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for his introduction. Just in case, I will declare my interest as a director of the London Stock Exchange Group plc; obviously, this would not affect the exchange, but I guess that it could be relevant to some of our competitors. Perhaps it would have been useful if we could have had one of those flow diagrams like the ones you make when you are trying to create your algorithm, to see the way through this. I will try to do that in my own little way, but it will have to be with words.

It seems that any passporting firm that provides services at the moment can continue by going into the temporary permissions regime, and then it can either become authorised or can bounce out of that regime because it will not go for a permanent authorisation; that has been contained mainly in things that we have dealt with previously. When we come to this provision, which is quite useful, those that are not intended to continue to be authorised indefinitely can either go into the supervised run-off, which does what it says on the tin in that they continue to be supervised here, or they can go into the contractual run-off, which relies on their home member state because they do not have an entity here. So you go into the supervised one when there is a branch here and you go into the contractual one if you do not have a branch here. That is clear.

However, I wonder what is going on when you might start to yo-yo between one and the other. It says that you can go from the SRO into the CRO; I suppose I could understand that if the branch closed down, so that it was going to be doing it remotely—is that how it is envisaged? What would cause the regulator to move it from the SRO into the CRO? Obviously, if there is a branch and you are in a run-off, there may come a point at which you say, “Hey, I want to close this branch and disappear”—so that seems to be one reason why you might need it. I was not quite clear why you might want to go the other way, from the CRO into the SRO, if there is no entity here to regulate—I cannot see that a branch would be invented. I could not quite understand why one would go in that direction.

Then there seemed to be a carve-out of some of the more important organisations, such as fund managers, trustees and depositories, and I can understand that they have to go into the temporary permissions regime—I agree with that. We are then probably dealing here on the markets side with smaller organisations. However, I was not quite sure how long they could be hanging around for. It says that it could be five years after entry into the regime; then it says that that is whether they enter on exit day or enter after having been in the TPR. So if they have been in the TPR, which is a year but which can keep on being extended, is there an end stop? Could some of these be hanging around for about 10 years, if the TPR was extended a few times and then they went into the SRO and the CRO for another five years? That seems a long time; I would have thought that five years for the combination might have been enough.

I was thinking that when of course I got to the parts such as those on the trade repositories and CCPs, where the PRA is in charge. There it is a much stricter regime, and quite rightly so, because you are looking here at market infrastructure and potentially bigger effects. However, there it will be a non-extendable period of one year or, in the second scenario, if they have been in the temporary permissions previously, the recognition may be adjusted—but, again, it will be no longer than one year. So it looks like they have been thinking around the problem I have related with regard to the market side of things. So that was in sharp contrast. My only concern was for how long as a maximum an organisation could be in the TPR and then in one of the run-off situations, because it does not make that clear.

Apart from that, I have no particular comment, and obviously it seems to be a very sensible provision to have made for the benefit of the stability of business that is going on in the UK. It would be very welcome if we knew that there was reciprocity in the rest of the EU for this, and it would be even better if we did not have to do it at all—but I suppose it is making the best of things in the circumstances.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I have just one quick question to follow on from the comments of my colleague, who is so much better versed in this than me. It struck me that we seem to have one timetable proposed by the FCA and a different one proposed by the PRA, without an awful lot of logic as to why one takes one approach and the other takes another. Are these two regulators working completely independently and sending over their various paragraphs that then get incorporated into the statutory instrument, or is there some coherent framework? If the regulators are not working together, what can we do to make sure that they will? It will be complicated enough for business without trying to work out which regulator is thinking which way. I would assume—I do not know—that some entities find that they face both regulators. Why the difference under the new rules that each regulator is bringing forward?