Financial Services and Markets Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 7th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Richard Fuller)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

The provisions of the Bill create the conditions for the United Kingdom to roll back or reform all European Union legislation for financial services that remains on our statute book. The Government will move at pace to implement a more agile and more internationally competitive set of rules that will harness the potential of UK financial services to stimulate growth across the United Kingdom.

Financial centres in the European Union, in the United States and across Asia are engaged with the United Kingdom in a global competition to attract financial services expertise, and to be the most successful in adopting the benefits of technology-driven change that may radically alter the shape and reach of financial services. The Bill will enable the United Kingdom to assert its leadership, and to drive forward change to capture a greater share of the global market for financial services. As the Prime Minister has said, the financial services sector is the

“jewel in the crown of the UK economy”,

and we are committed to supporting its ability to realise its full potential. An effective, efficient and easily accessible financial services sector is a vital foundation for the ease of daily life and for the national economy. The Government are therefore taking forward an ambitious set of reforms in this landmark Bill.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The Bill contains a new statutory objective on competitiveness and growth, which ranks those elements above the UK’s legally binding nature and climate targets. Given that a thriving economy depends on a thriving environment, will the Minister look at this again and consider introducing a climate-and-nature-specific statutory objective as well, so that there are two statutory objectives rather than a statutory objective and a regulatory principle, which are not the same thing?

[Richard Fuller]

The hon. Lady is right to point to the importance of the objectives that are set for the regulators in financial services, but surely she will accept that the most fundamental principle for each of them should be the stability of financial services in the United Kingdom, and we pay regard to that in the Bill. We have added, as she pointed out, some focus on global competition and on achieving growth across the United Kingdom. Those are the fundamental demands that the British people have of the financial services sector. However, it is important that we have regard to the issues that the hon. Lady has mentioned, and I am sure we will discuss them, and the priority that should be attached to them, in more detail in Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister and his officials for all the information about the measures in the Bill that they have shared in recent weeks and for how they have co-operated with me.

As the Minister said, the Bill implements the outcomes of the future regulatory framework review and attempts to set out a clear direction of travel for the regulation of the City post Brexit. It is important that the UK is able to take advantage of this opportunity to create a more competitive financial services sector and to strengthen our regulatory standards for financial stability and consumer protection outside the UK. After more than a decade of stagnant growth, averaging just 1.8% a year, and with the current dangers that face our economy, enabling the City to thrive will be fundamental to the delivery of the tax receipts we need to fund public services and support people through the cost of living crisis.

We on the Opposition Benches broadly support the Bill as it stands. In particular, we welcome clauses 1 to 7 and 8 to 23, which empower the UK, the FCA and the PRA to tailor regulation to meet our needs outside the EU. The Labour party recognises that the City is now in a place very different from where it was in 2016. The consensus view across the sector now is that the ship has sailed on regulatory equivalence with Europe, but regulatory divergence with the EU has the potential to produce many opportunities for the sector and the wider economy, such as the reform of Solvency II to unlock capital for investment in the green transition.

EU regulation can often be over-restrictive, particularly in respect of financial technologies, as the Minister will know, and we welcome the fact that the Bill enables regulators to take a more outcomes-based approach to areas such as fintech. However, Europe will always remain an important market for our financial services sector. In 2021, exports of financial services to the EU were worth £20.1 billion—that is 33% of all UK financial services exports.

Since 2018, the value of UK financial services exports to the EU have fallen by 19% in cash terms, and there has been little progress in securing trade deals for our financial services around the world. I have to say to the Minister that the sector is disappointed that the Government have so far failed to finalise a memorandum of understanding on regulatory co-operation, or to negotiate with the EU for the mutual recognition of professional qualifications for our service sectors. I hope that when the Minister sums up he will tell us what impact he believes the Bill will have in securing those important agreements with the EU and boosting financial services exports more generally.

The Minister will know that I like to ask a series of questions when I deal with him, and I am afraid there is more to come. Let me turn to clause 24. We support the principle that there is a role for the FCA and PRA to advance international competitiveness and growth. We on the Opposition Benches are strongly committed to supporting the City to retain its competitiveness on the world stage and to ensuring that the UK remains a global financial centre outside the EU. But it is also right that financial stability and consumer protection remain the priority for regulators. Any compromise on those important objectives would be self-defeating.

[Caroline Lucas]

I completely accept the hon. Lady’s point about our being a competitive financial centre, but does she agree that there is a real opportunity to be a competitive green financial centre? As that opportunity is time-limited—other countries are moving faster than we are—does she agree that a secondary objective in respect of climate and nature will be essential to ensure that we regulate in a way that allows us to make the most of that potential?

[Tulip Siddiq]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I will come on to that issue later in my speech. It felt as though Conservative Members did not agree with her, but I agree with what she said.

Financial Services and Markets Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 7th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

I beg to differ with the hon. Lady, because it is important to finance the transition to achieve a just green financial future. While we are making all these efforts and coming forward with things such as the taskforce on nature-related financial disclosures, we will therefore make sure that we are not defaulting to divestments and boycotts, because that is not our view of the way that the Government will finance the clean energy revolution.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The Bank of England’s climate stress test, published in May, showed that banks need to take climate action immediately or face a hit to annual profits of up to 15%. This is not just about airy-fairy words about the transition, but about banks that, as we have just heard, are bankrolling the fossil fuel industry, which will bring real risks to the finance sector as well as to the rest of the world. Can the Minister say whether he will support new clause 25?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Before the Minister does, I will just say that he has been speaking for three quarters of an hour now. A lot of people want to contribute to the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

I appreciate that I have thrown quite a lot at the Minister with not long to go in the debate, but I would appreciate it if he addressed some of my questions or wrote to me after the debate. Just by adopting new clause 15, he could take away some of the uncertainty. I welcome and appreciate the Bill—there is much in it that we can welcome—and I thank the Minister for his time.

[Caroline Lucas]

This Bill should be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ensure a rapid, stable, co-ordinated and just transition to a low-carbon economy, to advance financial inclusion and to protect consumers, investors, banks, asset managers and other financial institutions against the catastrophic financial risks associated with climate and nature breakdown. Sadly, I believe that it fails to deliver on all those counts, and many others too.

I have signed a number of new clauses with the aim of improving the Bill, on matters such as free access to cash and better regulation of buy now, pay later credit. I also strongly support the new clauses tabled by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake). However, I want to use my speaking time to focus on three new clauses in my name.

New clause 25 goes to the heart of what the Bill is about. It seeks to reposition the objectives of the regulator so that they are consistent with the future that we are facing. It would change the strategic objective so that it is no longer simply about ensuring that the relevant markets function well, but about ensuring that they deliver long-term economic resilience and prosperity. It would also create two new operational objectives. The first is a climate objective to facilitate the meeting of targets set out in the Climate Change Act 2008 and the 1.5°C temperature rise limit of the Paris agreement. The second is a nature objective, to facilitate alignment with the Government’s commitment to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030.

Those changes matter on a great many levels. Most obviously, as the United Nations Secretary-General warned just last month:

“We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing…And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.

We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

We therefore need to deploy every tool at our disposal to the task of creating an economy that reflects this new reality. There is no greater moral imperative, or indeed any greater financial imperative.

The Bank of England’s first climate stress test was published in May. It sought to understand how climate change would affect banks’ business models, and whether they held enough capital to cover climate-related risks. The results were clear: banks need to take climate action immediately, or face a hit to annual profits of up to 15%. If the net zero transition is delayed by a decade and global temperatures reach 1.8°, by 2050 banks will face losses of £225 billion. However, the banks are not alone in being exposed to huge climate risks. Investors, consumers, anyone with a pension, asset managers, savers, mortgage holders and other financial institutions are all threatened.

The Bill should provide an opportunity to meet those challenges and lay the foundations for a secure and stable future-facing economy, but I believe that without my new clauses, it simply does not do that. Leading financial institutions agree, including Aviva Investors, Phoenix, Hargreaves Lansdown and BUPA Insurance. They raised concerns with the Bill Committee, saying that

“the proposed regulatory principle will not provide a sufficiently strong legal basis for regulators to promote a thriving net zero financial sector. It certainly won’t encourage the regulators to ensure that the UK becomes the world’s leading green financial centre.”

Moreover, as it stands, nothing in the Bill acknowledges the crucial role of nature, although the Economic Secretary himself recognised in Committee that we could not achieve our climate goals without recognising and acknowledging that vital role.

New clause 25 would go further and remove the proposed competitiveness and growth operational objective for the FCA. The financial impacts of pursuing a climate-busting competitiveness and “growth at all costs” approach over climate action is clear. For example, it is estimated that the UK will lose 10% of GDP by 2050 if we do not tackle climate change, and that Europe will see a 30% rise in defaults on corporate loans to the most exposed companies. No wonder the Treasury Committee advised against a primary focus on competitiveness, warning that it could lead to weakening standards and a reduction in the UK’s financial resilience, and could undermine the reputation of the UK’s finance sector.

It is worth recalling that Parliament itself deliberately removed competitiveness from the mandate of the financial regulator just a decade ago, learning the lessons from the regulatory failure leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007-08, which saw millions lose their savings, homes, businesses and jobs. With so much at stake, I can think of no good reason why the Government is making such a reckless move, and no good reason why it could not instead support a focus on the creation of a wellbeing economy designed to foster long-term economic resilience and prosperity.

I have also tabled new clause 21, which mandates the introduction of a one-for-one capital requirement for the financing of new fossil fuels. In other words, for each pound that finances fossil fuels, financial institutions should have a pound of their own funds held liable for potential losses. It is a principle that is used elsewhere. In June 2021, for example, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision—the global standard setter for the regulation of banks—recommended its application to some cryptocurrencies’ exposures. At present, however, the Government are not seizing these opportunities.

Even with no fossil fuel expansion, by 2025 global emissions from existing projects will be 22% too high to stay below 1.5° and 66% too high by 2030—all while the scientific reality makes it clear that fossil fuels assets are uneconomic and financially uncompetitive in a 1.5° or 2° world. Fossil fuel financing increasingly threatens economic stability. It increases the physical risks of climate change, thereby leaving the financial system exposed to significant losses from balance sheets and from environmental damage to the wider economy. That is why these amendments are so important and that is why we should get fossil fuels out of our financial sector now.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I am going to speak briefly to new clause 7 on access to cash, and to new clause 27 on access to banking services. I very much support the Bill and completely commend what the Government are trying to do. It is a source of great pride that they are bringing financial regulation home as one of the great benefits of Brexit. I applaud what they are doing and appreciate all the engagement that Ministers have had with colleagues on the new clauses that I am speaking to.

I understand that there is an intention not to push new clause 27 to a vote, and I intend to abstain on new clause 7 if there is a Division on it, because I look forward to the policy statement that the Government have promised. I support the principle behind both the new clauses. As Members have mentioned, we seem to be moving inevitably towards a cashless society, and we can all see the personal convenience of that. Like the royal family, I personally do not carry cash around. It is only embarrassing when I am in church and the platter comes around. That is pretty much the only occasion when I feel the need for it, but that is not the case for everyone.

For anyone using a digital payments system, the operator of the platform has potentially immense control over their life, in principle and in practice. That is why what PayPal did to the Free Speech Union and others a few months ago is so important. Yes, we can acknowledge that that event was an outlier. It was a rare and slightly inexplicable event and, yes, it was quickly corrected in some of the cases of the accounts that were closed, but the fact is that it happened. It was a straw in the wind, and the fact that individuals and organisations with heterodox political opinions found themselves unable to operate economically because of the decision of a private company acting entirely on its own initiative, possibly under pressure from external campaigns, is a troubling development. So it is vital that we send the strongest regulatory, and also cultural and political, signal to these private payment platforms that the opinions of their customers are none of their business.

Nor are private opinions any business of the state, and this is why the question of access to cash is about more than the important issue of protecting the vulnerable, although I agree with the points that have been made on that. It is also about liberty. Just now, behind the scenes, the Government and the Bank of England are developing plans for their own central bank digital currency. Again, we can see the practical appeal, but the threat is that the Government will have oversight of the economic activity of private citizens, which is something that no Government of this country have ever had in our history. It is therefore vital that the debate on a central bank digital currency has liberty front and centre. We can all say warm words about the importance of safeguards and freedoms, but the fact is that if the emergency is bad enough and the powers are available, those powers could well be used.

We saw this happening around the world, and to some degree in our own country, during the covid crisis. We have only to look at what the Canadian Government did to block access to the bank accounts of truckers protesting against the covid policy there to see what can be done in a modern liberal western country. It would be a shame if we took back control of financial regulation from the EU only to empower private payment platforms, or indeed our own central bank, in that way. Cash services and banking services are part of the infrastructure of our communities. They are also part of the infrastructure of liberty.