Financial Services Bill

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 28th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con) [V]]

I welcome the Bill and congratulate my noble friend on bringing it forward. I add my warm congratulations to my noble friend Lord Hammond of Runnymede. Being elected on the same day, I am glad to see another from the class of 1997 joining our Benches. I also give a very warm welcome to the noble Baroness, Lady Shafik, and I look forward to hearing both their contributions going forward.

I support all the objectives of this Bill, and I entirely endorse the contributions that the financial sector makes to the UK economy, not just in London but also Leeds and Edinburgh in particular. I will focus on some aspects in the current Bill that I would like to see strengthened as well as aspects that are not in it, which I hope to pursue in Committee.

I warmly welcome Clause 35 and the “Successor accounts for Help-to-Save savers”. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, I have sympathy with the request and briefing from Macmillan, calling for support for cancer patients, who are a most vulnerable group in a particular time of need. When undergoing both diagnosis and subsequent treatment, they often enter a period where their financial circumstances are severely compromised. I believe that the FCA’s contention that the current principles are adequate needs to be qualified, and therefore I have some sympathy with the call for a statutory duty of care in this regard. I would very much welcome my noble friend’s response to that particular call.

I also hope that this Bill and its provisions will give the opportunity to review how the regulations, which came into force in 2012, on short selling are currently working. I believe that that is a particularly distasteful and immoral practice, and my noble friend may prefer to pursue this through international and global means. Therefore, I would be very interested to hear what discussions he and his colleagues at the Treasury have had within the context of the OECD and other international organisations. However, I believe that this would be a good opportunity to go back and revisit these regulations and see how they are operating. At worst, they can be very damaging to the economy and employment, leading to many people losing their businesses and livelihoods.

I turn to the question of green financing and the opportunity that this would give, in the context of the Bill, to benchmark all stocks against green credentials. For me, a particularly welcome recent move has been the ban on fracking in the United States.

I will quote the words of Mark Carney, who said when he launched his Green Horizon summit in November last year:

“Private finance will play a critical role in funding the initiatives and innovations of the private sector and helping companies realign their business models for net zero.”


I believe that the COP 26 climate change summit, which the UK is hosting in Glasgow in November, will be an ideal opportunity to ensure that the UK is at the forefront of green finance. I hope that, as the Bill before us today passes through its legislative stages, it will give us an opportunity to show that London, Edinburgh, Leeds and other financial centres in the UK are at the heart of green financing. I support the Bill and look forward to its passage through this House.