Financial Services Bill

Baroness Penn Excerpts

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

[Lord Sikka (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hammond, on his excellent speech. I welcome him to the House and look forward to his wise words on many issues.

The Bill has many deficiencies. I have sufficient time to speak on only two matters. In the post-Brexit world, the UK needs to compete to attract business. A key requirement is to ensure that the UK is a clean place with robust regulators. However, the Bill does not do that. It should have been preceded by an independent public inquiry into the finance industry and its regulation.

Regulatory failures continue to make headlines. For example, Dame Elizabeth Gloster’s report on the collapse of London Capital and Finance found that the FCA’s supervision was “wholly deficient” and that its staff

“had not been trained sufficiently to analyse a firm’s financial information to detect indicators of fraud or other serious irregularity.”

The report concluded that the FCA failed to fulfil its statutory objectives. The FCA has also been criticised in a report on the collapse of the Connaught Income Fund, and the long-running saga of frauds at the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS are further evidence of the FCA’s failures.

Anyone tackling corrupt practices in the finance industry faces obstacles. In February 2017, the Thames Valley police and crime commissioner, Anthony Stansfeld, prosecuted six financiers, including a senior ex-HBOS banker. They were jailed for a total of 47 and a half years. After being shamed, the FCA in June 2019 fined Lloyds Bank £45.5 million. Thames Valley Police force spent £7 million on the prosecutions, but it has not really been compensated by the Government and thus the force has been disabled from mounting any further investigations.

The Conservative police and crime commissioner for Thames Valley has also sought to tackle other cases of financial frauds but has met political and regulatory opposition. On 8 February 2019, he told the London Evening Standard:

“I am convinced the cover-up goes right up to Cabinet level. And to the top of the City.”


That is a strong condemnation of the current regulatory arrangements. The recurring problem is that the regulators are too close to the industry and like to bat for the industry rather than protect people from malpractices. The Bill does not cleanse the finance industry or enhance protections for the people.

My second point relates to the Basel III framework which is implemented by the Bill and affects the calculation of minimum capital requirements and leverage ratios for banks. However, many of the problems highlighted by the 2007-08 crash remain unaddressed. The Government want banks to have more equity, but they have incentivised debt and high leverage, as the interest payments attract tax relief and enable banks to report higher returns to shareholders. Why have the Government not addressed this contradiction at the heart of the calculations of capital for banks?

Financial statements of regulated financial enterprises are based on international financial reporting standards—IFRSs, as they are commonly known. Their use was heavily criticised in the 2013 report by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. The IFRSs give management too much discretion and management has used that to massage financial statements, as was shown by Carillion, for example. The IFRSs have no clear concept of capital maintenance and therefore calculations of capital based upon accounting numbers are fundamentally flawed. On bank balance sheets, various transactions in historical costs, amortised costs, net realisable values, present values, fair values, market values and even internally generated numbers are all added up. The calculation does not yield any meaningful number for capital maintenance. Banks are currently neither maintaining money, nor real or physical capital, so why do the Government consider them to be a useful guide for regulators?

Neither the FCA nor the Prudential Regulation Authority sets accounting rules for financial enterprises, but they rely on whatever the Financial Reporting Council comes up with. They are storing trouble for the future. The bank financial statements are targeted at short-term shareholders, essentially speculators and capital markets. They do not tell the regulators anything about market interdependencies or systemic risks, all of which were the causes of the 2007-08 crash.

The UK regulators rely on external auditors, even though big accounting firms are unable to deliver honest and robust audits. All banks which crashed in the 2007-08 crash received unqualified audit reports. The Financial Reporting Council routinely laments that 25% to 50% of the audits conducted by the big four accounting firms are deficient. Yet, bizarrely, regulators rely upon auditors. Auditors owe a duty of care to the company but not to any regulator. Regulators do not have a statutory right of access to the auditors’ files or staff. That was one of the reasons why the Bank of England was unable to fully investigate audit failures at Barings, delivered by Deloitte and Coopers & Lybrand, a firm which is now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Yet no lessons have been learned. One must also ask whether the reliance on ex-post audits is wise in a world of instantaneous movement of money. Is it not time that the regulators took direct responsibility for auditing the financial statements of banks?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps this is an opportune moment to remind Back-Benchers of the advisory time limit of six minutes for speeches.