Financial Services and Markets Bill

Ben Lake Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 7th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

It is an honour to be able to contribute on this important Bill this evening and a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Dr Davies), who gave us a masterful and detailed account of the problems and challenges that the loss of bank services and bank branches causes for rural communities in particular. I hope to emulate some of his mastery of the subject in my remarks.

I wish to begin by associating myself with some of the concerns raised by other Members, particularly my friend the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant), who talked about the transfer of responsibility and scrutiny power away from Parliament and more towards the regulators and, in certain respects, as regards the repatriation of some of the regulations, to designated legislation committees.

I also associate myself with the concerns that have been voiced about the need to strengthen as an objective for the regulators the need for sustainable growth and to ensure that they are very much aligned with some of the Government’s expectations on net zero. I do not think that we have yet heard an explanation as to why that statutory objective cannot be placed on the regulators. I see it as working hand in hand with sustainable growth and competitiveness; they do not necessarily need to compete with each other.

As I mentioned, I will focus my remarks on access to cash. In particular, part 2 of the Bill—clauses 47 and 48 —and the corresponding schedules 8 and 9 have a great deal to commend them. I put on record my support for some of those measures, which I believe will bring a real improvement, safeguarding access to cash for so many of our communities. Of course, we must note that a lot of communities, including in my own constituency of Ceredigion, have already suffered the loss of bank branches and ATMs. It has long been the case that people in those communities have had to travel 10 or 15 miles in order to access a free ATM, but the Bill at least puts in place a set of regulations and a process to ensure that no further gaps arise in future. For that, I do welcome it.

However, returning to a point that has been made by several hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) and for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), I ask the Government whether it would be possible to extend the remit of the access-to-cash clauses to include certain services, and in particular in-person services. Other Members have explained just how important continued access to in-person services—branch services—is for many individuals; we have heard about their particular importance to the elderly, and to those who are perhaps not IT literate. I would add that in some rural areas, of course, digital banking remains a distant dream due to a lack of connectivity, so the ability to access personal banking advice is an essential amenity for residents of those areas.

However, something that bears repeating—I admit that it is perhaps not something I have afforded enough attention to in the past—is the impact that the loss of in-person banking services has on small businesses and on charitable and community organisations. Over the past decade or so in Ceredigion, we have seen a number of towns lose their final bank. Nevertheless, they are still market towns; they try to plough for a prosperous future, but the loss of in-person banking services has had an impact on small businesses and on charitable and community organisations.

To offer a few examples, small businesses in Tregaron, in Lampeter, and increasingly those in Llandysul, will often have to travel to Carmarthen, which may be a round trip of between 45 and 60 miles, depending on where they are located. Of course, the banks open during business hours, which to small businesses entails either closing for a few hours in order to deposit cash or access other banking services, or going without. I know for a fact that many businesses are now having to amend their business practices in unhelpful ways in order to accommodate that new banking reality.

It has also been a real challenge for many charitable and community organisations to open accounts. For example, I have been told that a community pub initiative had to wait almost nine weeks to open a bank account due to the changes in services locally. Charities, in particular, have reported to me that banks just do not understand the specific requirements they have as account holders; they do not understand that changing mandates in person is a particular task for charities. In rural areas, as in many others, many of those charitable groups and organisations make a valuable contribution to communities. At the end of the day, they are staffed by volunteers, and forcing those volunteers to travel 60-odd miles just to change a bank mandate is unfair.

That is why I would be very interested to see whether the Government could extend the new access-to-cash requirements to include those banking services. At the moment, I am afraid, banks are not waking up of their own volition to the importance of maintaining those services in rural areas, and communities are being let down. That is where the Government could step in; that would be a very important intervention, and would be much welcomed on both sides of the House.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The last Member with six minutes is Harriett Baldwin, and then we will go to five minutes, so everybody will have exactly the same amount of time.