Financial Services and Markets Bill [HL]

Baroness Hyde of Bemerton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hyde of Bemerton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for bringing this Bill and for its many important clauses. We have had some excellent contributions, but I particularly thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for his powerful intervention on the nature of debt and its particularly devastating consequences, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, for raising the important issue of financial abuse and how this Bill may legislate to be firmly on the side of victims/survivors.

I wanted to contribute to this debate not because I am an expert in financial services, as many eminent speakers across your Lordships’ House today are, but because I care about fairness and the accessibility of financial services to all in our society, so that everyone in the country is able to access ethical and affordable finance. I welcome the measures in this Bill and particularly the clauses on credit unions and measures to protect face-to-face banking. As a member of the sister party to the Labour Party, the Co-operative Party, I declare an interest, and I was delighted to see the Labour manifesto commitment in 2024 to double the size of the UK’s co-operative and mutuals sector. This Bill puts legislative meat on the manifesto bones of how we might do that.

A financial system should serve the economy, and the economy should serve society. As last year’s Triodos Bank report noted, finance has too often become

“an end in itself, a self-referential network of balance sheets and algorithms, more focused on extracting value than creating it”.

This Labour Government are committed to growth, but not growth at any cost—not extractive slash-and-burn economics but growth that offers people in every part of the UK the opportunity to flourish.

Before I come to the proposed changes in the Bill, I will outline why these measures to increase the use of credit unions are so crucial. As other noble Lords have said, the UK has an affordable credit problem. Between 16 million and 20 million people, depending on the source you use, are underserved by the credit market. That is up to 20 million people in the UK who typically have a credit history that falls outside mainstream underwriting criteria. This is a large, non-standard population with a growing need for credit. They broadly fall into three groups. The first is those known as “thin file”: people with low or no credit history. The second is the credit impaired: those with a poor credit rating, which often may be linked to disruptive life events that are usually temporary, such as moving house repeatedly, divorce or loss of a job, which might lead to missed repayments. The third group is those who are highly indebted: people who have taken on too much debt and cannot afford to repay it. These households are facing material economic headwinds, and access to affordable credit is crucial to ensure the near-term economic well-being of those people, their families and communities, and to ensure that the near-term economic conditions do not become entrenched, affecting the long-term viability of these households and communities as credible borrowers.

Outside the realm of personal finance, SMEs and social enterprises also face a multi-billion pound finance gap, particularly those based outside London and the south-east. According to figures from the Federation of Small Businesses, over half of small businesses rate the overall availability and affordability of new credit as poor.

Those are some of the reasons why I am passionate about credit unions and their increased use. As has been said before in this debate, they are member-owned co-operatives with deep ties to local communities, and they are accountable to their members rather than to shareholders. They provide access to credit for people who may be excluded from high street banks, and they offer a more relationship-based model of lending—an essential quality of a financial system that works for everyone in society.

To illustrate this, I have picked a few thumbnail testimonials from Salford Credit Union. One example is the unemployed parent who was offered a free college course to train as a hairdresser. They could not afford the £200 needed to provide the equipment to undertake that course. Salford Credit Union stepped in and loaned them £200, and they were able to buy the kit, retrain and then pay that loan back when employed as a hairdresser. Another example is the person with two children made homeless due to domestic abuse. They were rehoused by a housing association—quite right too—but that property had no furniture. So they applied for and received a loan of £700 to buy furniture, which they were able to pay back at the reasonable rate of £15 per week.

Take the man who was living in a hostel and whose only income came from selling the Big Issue. He was desperate to move out of that hostel because of the difficult living conditions and the abuse he suffered. Over a number of months, the credit union helped him slowly save enough for his own deposit to rent a flat in the private rented sector. He would not have been able to do that without the assistance of Salford Credit Union. I could go on and on—credit unions are brilliant—but, crucially, the proposed reforms to the common bond will enable the credit unions to serve that wider membership. This is an overdue reform, and another reminder of how this Labour Government are working hard every day to improve things for all citizens nationwide.

To support even greater sustainable growth and use of credit unions, I ask my noble friend the Minister to consider capital reforms to credit unions—for example, enabling access to new forms of investment through them. There is also currently no overarching mechanism to assess how effectively banks are meeting the credit needs of underserved communities, and there is no mandate for the FCA to drive that change. So, again, I ask my noble friend the Minister whether the Bill could address this by requiring greater transparency and accountability from mainstream lenders, including formalising a referral pathway to credit unions or community development finance institutions where customers have been declined by them.

Credit unions and community development finance institutions are often best placed to support people and businesses excluded from mainstream finance. In 2025 alone, community development finance institutions lent over £389 million to small businesses, start-ups and individuals. That launched 5,741 businesses, created over 7,000 jobs and safeguarded over 6,500 jobs. Some 88% of those business customers had been previously declined by another lender. With CDFIs lending disproportionately to ethnic minority-led businesses, women-led businesses and businesses based in areas of high deprivation—demonstrating their growing contribution to inclusive economic growth and local resilience—I ask my noble friend the Minister to look again at these and how they might be used more.

Credit unions are a growing and increasingly important part of the UK’s community finance infrastructure, providing affordable lending, savings and financial resilience to millions of people. So let us noble Lords make the most of the opportunity presented by this legislation to turbocharge the potential of credit unions. Finance is not an abstract mechanism; it is a social relationship built on trust, shared expectations and collective institutions—a common bond indeed, at a time when the need is ever greater to spread more widely vehicles for all types of common bond, not just the kind found in credit unions, and to use them wherever possible.