Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Bill [HL]

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, I shall try to be brief in my contribution to this Second Reading debate. Until late last week, I had not intended to take part in the debate so I did not attend the briefing meeting that I understand my noble friend the Minister arranged. I also apologise to him for not giving notice of the points that I will be making, which arose only late last week. Indeed, some of my briefing arrived only late this morning. I should say at the outset that I fully support the Bill and endorse what my noble friend the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, said about its importance.

While the Bill is about consumer insurance, its impact will not be confined to consumers or insurance companies. Insurance is often sold through people other than insurance companies, which is where the BBA’s members come on to the scene, because banks typically sell insurance products alongside other financial products. It is important, therefore, that the banks can implement the new requirements effectively. Implementation is the topic that I want to address.

Clause 12 deals with the timetable for implementation and provides in broad terms that the legislation will not come into effect until an order is laid, which cannot be for a year after Royal Assent. Implementation could be from some time after next summer. The Minister will be aware that when banks and, indeed, others sell financial products, they have to ensure that their documentation is compliant with legal and regulation rules. Importantly, they have to train their staff and support them with such things as standard scripts to ensure that the rules are complied with.

As the briefing provided by the Financial Ombudsman Service today makes plain, the emphasis of the sales process for insurance products will, as a result of the Bill, shift much more towards asking relevant questions and obtaining specific information. Banks will need to ensure that their staff ask the right questions and then probe the answers to those questions in the appropriate way. More importantly, they will have to assemble the right evidence in all this so that, if necessary, they can determine and prove whether a customer has taken care in providing relevant information.

Many banks sell face to face and do not have the ready evidence provided by telephone or internet sales, so the evidence aspect to this is important. In addition to addressing the sales process, banks obviously have to review and perhaps modify compliance systems. Inevitably, there will also be changes to and investment in information systems. I should stress that the BBA, in briefing me, has no problem with that at all. The issue is not any changes that might be necessary but timing.

As the Minister will be aware, the FSA is in the process of requiring implementation of its retail distribution review, with an implementation date of December 2012—some 18 months away. The changes that will come about through this Bill will involve to some degree the same systems, processes and people to be trained as the RDR; they will not be exactly the same, but they will be in the same area. In addition, the industry will look to the impact of the new simplified advice area, which could well have an impact on insurance sales. The industry is still awaiting FSA guidance on simplified advice and hence does not know what implications that will have for the sales process. If it does have implications, it will be in exactly the same area.

The banks and doubtless others affected by the RDR and simplified advice want to be in a position, if possible, to implement all the changes in one go. It does not make business sense to carry out one set of modifications to systems, processes, training and so on and then to follow it a matter of months later with another similar set in the same area. In theory, it can be done in sequential implementations, but that is not the most efficient way in which to proceed. It adds cost to the system and probably increases implementation risk. How do the Government see the implementation timetable of the Bill? Will it be harmonised with that for the RDR and simplified advice?

The BBA has also raised the issue of the interaction between the Bill and IMD 2—that is, the proposed revision to the insurance mediation directive. The Commission is currently conducting an impact assessment of the changes and expects to produce a revision to the existing directive by the end of the year. This could well also produce changes in the same sorts of areas, raising the same sorts of issues. Have the Government considered the impact of the Bill in relation to IMD2? I hope that my noble friend can reassure me that the Government will be mindful of the burdens on those who need to implement changes in the interface with consumers when they determine when to bring the Bill into effect.