Financial Services and Markets Bill

Baroness Lawlor Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 13th June 2023 Lords Chamber

I hope that, this time, I may receive a slightly more positive response from my noble friend. That would be taken by many in the industry as a sign that the Government really are now determined to do what we were promised: replace the cumbersome EU financial services regime with one more suited to our needs and that will ensure that the City holds, and builds further on, its position as the world’s most successful financial centre, ensuring the resumption of the growth in the economy that is so badly needed. I beg to move.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Trenchard’s Amendment 120, to which I have added my name and which I spoke in favour of in Committee. He then spoke of the history of this legislation, which was unintended by one EU commissioner and then pushed through, for matters of politics, by his successor under José Manuel Barroso: Michel Barnier, who saw it as part of the plan for a banking and monetary union for the EU—a plan that the UK was and is not part of and has no intention of joining.

The whole UK financial sector accounts for 8% of our economy—the same proportion as in the US and Canada—whereas financial services account for only 4% of the two major economies of the EU. The ironic thing about this legislation is that 75% of alternative funds were in UK businesses then, and the funds account for that sort of proportion in our own sector today.

My main concern is that this diverse sector, which has flourished in the UK under UK law, remains under an opaque legislative system. EU regulation is unpredictable and the EU’s system, with the precautionary approach, seems to cover every eventuality but in practice it can fall short. It often favours big players over small and nimble entrepreneurs and the challengers. There is little certainty about transactions in advance, and little predictability as to how the regulators will judge.

We spoke about this in respect of the whole sector in Committee, but it is important for the alternative funds industry in particular. If we move, we need to move away from the way of thinking into which our regulators have crept. They have absorbed this precautionary approach to regulation from the EU—as well they might, after two decades.

I was glad my noble friend suggested that the hope —the intention—is that we will end EU law, but I stressed then, and would like to stress again, the importance of ending the thinking about precaution and hesitation in grasping the opportunities once we are out. That is very important for the regulators in this sector.

I shall just give a few examples. We have in English law an approach to business which, given the principle of contractual autonomy, means that the law honours contracts and contractual arrangements. It does not rely on the subjective principle of good faith, which creates uncertainty for practitioners about the expected moral and other standards of behaviour. In German civil code, parties must observe good faith in both negotiation and in performance of contracts but, without a definition of good faith in German contract law, things are uncertain.

The other aspect of UK law that I think is good for the sector is that it is flexible. This is a very flexible sector, and the judiciary’s ruling, interpreting and developing of law through its application to specific cases in different sectors moves with the times and adapts to innovation—the new structures and transactions of a fast-moving business. But that cannot happen under the rule books or their architects, the courts, or indeed in the thinking, because courts, by contrast, are not subject to the constraints of the legislative process and can react and achieve change more effectively, and this judiciary is recognised globally to be wise, deeply knowledgeable and authoritative.

I took heart from the Minister’s assurance in Committee, and again during the first day of Report, about the intention to revoke all EU laws and replace those that were considered necessary with—I use her words—an “appropriate replacement” before eliminating any aspect of the legacy. But perhaps I could ask her to think again about AIFMD. Waiting for an “appropriate replacement” sounds more like Whitehall-speak for regulation of the type that has been absorbed and reflected by our regulators under the Treasury in recent decades. Perhaps this piece of legislation could be used as a pilot for ending something that, as the noble Viscount said, was not wanted by the sector, and which the Committee warned could have dangerous repercussions for the UK’s role in global markets and in dealing with America. Because of that, there are very good reasons to let it go, because it is not a consumer-facing industry; it is for the sector itself. It can only be to the good if this sector is set free without any replacement, so that it can benefit under the benefits of UK law.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak only briefly in support of my noble friend Lord Trenchard. It was commonly known, and widely reported in the newspapers at the time, that following the financial crash of 2008, the EU, which has always had its doubts and scepticism—indeed, hostility—about what it referred to as Anglo-Saxon finance, withdrew the indulgence that it had previously shown towards the City of London as part of the European Union and started to enact legislation that was injurious to the City of London, and quite deliberately so, to the annoyance of the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, George Osborne, who was reasonably open about his opposition.

This instrument, the alternative funds directive, was the prime example of that, although there were others. It contributed significantly to the fact that there was much more support for Brexit in the City of London than people often wanted to admit at the time, or have admitted since, because they understood that that oppositional turn had taken place and the tide was now flowing against the City. So I agree with my noble friend that it is very difficult to see why, now that we have the opportunity to remove it, we continue not to do so year after year—and there are other examples of that.

I also support the remarks of my noble friend Lady Lawlor. There is a prevalent idea—and not just in financial legislation—that, as we get rid of European Union legislation that we no longer need, we need to replace it with legislation that almost replicates what the European Union was doing. A prime example of that outside the field of financial services is the Procurement Bill, a massively complicated piece of legislation replicating European Union legislation, almost in great detail. In fact, the procurement legislation of the European Union—which was obviously designed for 28 states, not simply for the United Kingdom—was there largely to deal with problems embedded in a history of municipal corruption, which were manifest in various European states but, I am glad to say, of which the United Kingdom has a long, proud history of being pretty free, with one or two exceptions. It was not necessary to replicate it in the detail in which it was done.

There are genuine concerns, certainly among those of us on this side of the House, that insufficient dispatch is being brought to getting rid of injurious legislation that we inherited from the European Union but can now get rid of, and that there is a mentality that the right way to get rid of something is, in effect, simply to re-enact something very similar after a period of consultation. I have great sympathy with what my two noble friends said, and I hope that the Minister, when she replies, will be able to give them some comfort.