Chuka Umunna
Main Page: Chuka Umunna (Liberal Democrat - Streatham)(13 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
I beg to move amendment (a), to leave out
“alongside measures to increase access to affordable credit, regulatory powers that put”
and insert
“measures to increase access to affordable credit; urges regulators to consider putting”.
The amendment stands in the name of more than 20 other Back Benchers, and I am grateful to the many distinguished Back Benchers from different parties for their support and to the Backbench Business Committee for the opportunity to speak in this debate.
I move this amendment in support of the excellent motion of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), and I congratulate her on the passionate campaign she has led to secure this debate and on the meticulous research that underpins her motion today and her speech. I support her campaign for better financial education, and I was delighted to become a founder member of the all-party parliamentary group on financial education for young people, along with her and many other Members, when it was launched by my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who has seconded this amendment.
We are debating a motion that I personally would be prepared to support in its entirety, but which, through a small change, I hope will win even greater support from both sides of the Chamber. The purpose of the amendment is to set forth clearly the opinion of this whole House—and in particular of Back Benchers from every party—on such an important matter and to support the call for action on the cost of credit and the means by which the hon. Lady has called for action with a range of caps, but also to clarify that the answer is not necessarily new regulatory powers. I move this amendment as a result of concerns raised with me both by constituents and by fellow Back Benchers that one aspect of the motion could see it defeated were it left unchanged. I think this is too important a matter to allow that to happen.
The amendment protects the wording that calls on the Government to increase access to affordable credit. It is absolutely right that the Government should act in this area; that is a point from which I think few would demur. I have had some involvement in two significant initiatives that the Government are already taking on this front. They are initiatives that benefit many people in my constituency of Worcester. I have spoken in this House before about the importance of the move to bring credit unions into the post office network, and I know that the Black Pear credit union in Worcester is anxious that this measure be brought forward as soon as possible. Like the hon. Lady, I have campaigned on my high street, in my case leafleting for this credit union. I am glad to be able to say that Labour councillors in Worcester do the same. I would like to take this opportunity to remind the Government of the urgency of the need for progress on this matter and of the revitalising effect that this step could have for both our credit unions and our post offices.
The second organisation that I wish to mention in this context is My Home Finance, whose shop in Worcester I was delighted to open just before Christmas. It is supported by local housing associations including Sanctuary Housing, Nexus Housing and Worcester Community Housing, and it is backed by the Department for Work and Pensions and the Royal Bank of Scotland. This great new initiative provides loans directly to people’s bank accounts at an APR of 29.9%, compared with typical doorstep loans of 272% or loan shark rates with APRs in the thousands. Moves such as these that are already under way reflect the priority which the Government are already giving to increasing access to affordable credit, but I have no reservations in calling on the Government to do still more.
What I and many other Back Benchers on the Government Benches feel uncomfortable about supporting is the call to create new regulatory powers at this moment in time. We will hear many arguments in this debate about the effect of capping rates. Some will argue, as I do, that some form of flexible capping is not only attractive but morally right, while others will warn of the perils of driving people out of the regulated market altogether and into the hands of loan sharks. The hon. Member for Walthamstow has suggested an elegant solution in her form of words in the motion, taking account of the need to balance access with price and providing a degree of flexibility, but even this formulation requires the Government to introduce new regulatory powers.
Many of my colleagues on the Government Benches are allergic to increasing regulation, and all of us would like to see better, rather than more, regulation accepted as a general principle of government. I and many other Members fear that for the Government to create new regulatory powers in this area at this moment could be a mistake. To regulate without a very careful analysis of the market would carry great risks and, as so often happened in the past, such regulation could have unintended consequences.
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
I noted the wording in the hon. Gentleman’s amendment. If we are to introduce further regulation, is now not the time to do it, given the Government’s current big reforms of financial services in general in this country, some of which I support? I accept that regulation is not necessarily always the answer, but one of the problems with the financial services sector is that it can be very short-termist and has to take account primarily of maximising shareholder value through dividends and increasing share prices. To my mind that is precisely why, in this case, we need to have regulation. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman can enlighten us about why he thinks the sector can in this respect voluntarily bring itself to heel.
Mr Walker
I am very grateful for that intervention as it gives me time to make the next part of my speech, which is on that very subject. I am certainly not calling for self-regulation in this area. I am calling for the regulators to look at this.
It is important to note that the Government have announced plans to create a new consumer protection and markets agency, whose focus will be squarely on protecting individuals and consumers. That will be a refreshing change from the vast and fragmented scope of the Financial Services Agency. Such an agency would be ideally placed to consider this matter and to work closely with consumers and the industry to find the best way to deliver a range of caps on prices, balancing the needs of access to credit with those of price. Without that regulator in place, I believe it would be a mistake to create new regulatory powers subjecting such an important matter to the change and disruption inevitably entailed in a handover of responsibilities: far better that we clearly indicate the will of this House that regulators must consider these matters and take them seriously.
I return to the fact that I support this motion. Like many other Back Benchers of all parties, I want to see action taken to cap the cost of credit. I am deeply concerned about the levels of interest charged for payday lending and want to do everything I can to protect my constituents from loan sharks.
Damian Hinds
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention and for being my minute man. That does create extra flexibility but we do need to know what we are talking about. A number of hon. Members have drawn a distinction between an interest rate cap and a cap that includes interest and other charges—that is what the annual percentage rate is; APR includes some other charges. It does not include behavioural charges, default charges and so on, and I do not understand mathematically—I am happy to take an intervention on this for a second minute—how they could be factored into a general cap that would apply to credit products extended to everybody, given that, by definition, behavioural and default charges are incurred only by some customers.
Another problem with the motion is its emphasis on a lack of competitiveness, because that is not the problem in this area. I do not wish to be too pernickety, but I do not think that “many” lenders can be in a “near monopoly” position, as the motion suggests. In many ways, stimulating competitiveness further might end up being counter-productive, but in the three minutes available there is no chance of our discussing that aspect.
This country is both blessed and cursed with a very diverse and dynamic consumer credit market. We are blessed because of the variety, where there is a product to suit just about every need in the market. Even payday lending can be very rational; it could be very rational for someone trying to avoid current account bounce charges to take out a payday loan instead. Very few people are excluded from the legal and, therefore, regulatable market altogether.
We are cursed by this market because of the ubiquity of the messages about credit that people are bombarded with; the emphasis on what people want to borrow, rather than what they need or can afford to pay back; and the complexity involved. Even very highly educated people find it difficult to understand every product and every aspect of every product. I am sure that some Members of this House struggle, as I do, with understanding some aspects of some of these products.
That complexity highlights one of the great difficulties with introducing new regulation, because companies make money in this market in lots of different ways. Rent-to-own companies, such as BrightHouse, which has been mentioned more than once in this debate, would almost certainly not be curtailed by any restriction on the cost of credit, because so much of the money they make is on the sticker price, relative to Argos or Currys, rather than on the charge for credit.
I am running out of time already, so I had better hurry up. The experience in America suggests that where there is effective regulation of cash lending, other sectors such as rent-to-own or good old-fashioned catalogues are stimulated, and if there is a clamp down on interest rate charges, that will stimulate growth in behavioural charges and so on. Everybody in this House probably agrees that a blunt, general, across-the-board APR cap is not a good idea, so the challenge is whether we can come up with a regime that curbs the worst excesses of the market without putting entire segments and entire product categories out of the market, and that protects the most vulnerable. We need a regime that does not push them into the arms of illegal loan sharks—the sort of people for whom the idea of a late payment penalty is a cigarette burn to the forearm.
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) on securing this debate, which I think has been a very good one. I also endorse the comments of the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) about the amendment.
In the little time available, I want to widen the debate to talk about financial exclusion in general. We have discussed these issues over the past few weeks, and in the coming months, when we will be talking about some of the big macro-prudential issues relating to the financial services sector, we will be considering whether to separate out our banks between investment and retail; and we will also be considering banks’ loss-absorbing capacity, risk assets and such like. However, it is extremely important that we do not forget some of the issues presenting challenges for the people we represent. The hon. Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer), who is no longer in his place, referred to the raw deal that many of our constituents are getting from the big retail banks. I endorse what he said.
A 2004 investigation by The Guardian found that payment protection insurance, for example, was being widely mis-sold by many of the banks to customers who would not be able to claim under the terms of the insurance. Banks were making profit margins of up to 80% on those products. I am a member of the Treasury Select Committee, and last November I took the chief executive officer of Lloyds Banking Group to task for charging extortionate rates of interest for arranged overdrafts. He was levying a charge of 19.3% on his customers—more than 38 times the bank of England base rate. Last month, Barclays was fined £7.7 million by the Financial Services Authority for misleading savers, and RBS was fined £2.8 million by the FSA for its inadequate handling of customer complaints.
The increase in personal debt has been mentioned. It is not coincidental that, since 2000, productivity has risen at double the rate of wages, which have in some sense stagnated. As a consequence, people have borrowed and household debt has exploded. That might also explain why we have seen an explosion in the demand for short-term credit. It has already been mentioned that in 2009 the payday lending industry was worth more than £2.2 billion—more than 3.5 times what it was in 2006. However, we are where we are, and the need for credit has now become a basic essential of everyday life. I would be prepared to bet that most people in the Chamber have a credit card. We all come under different stresses when we go through different things in our lives—for example, moving home.
One of the problems is that it is often the poor and the vulnerable who are most in need of credit. That was one reason I wanted to participate in today’s debate. I represent a constituency that is varied but has pockets of severe deprivation, and we find that it is those people who are struggling to gain access to credit and struggling with financial issues. In the past four months, my local citizens advice bureau has dealt with well over 400 debt advice queries. Despite that, however, those poor and vulnerable people are the very ones getting the rawest deal from the sector in terms of the services they are being provided with. Three million people in this country do not have a bank account, and 35% of those in deprived communities do not have access to simple banking services.
I think that the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) mentioned the fact that the industry has pointed to all that it has been doing since 2003 to introduce basic bank accounts. Typically, the bank accounts that have been introduced since that time allow customers to receive their pension or benefit payments and perhaps have a debit card, but they do not offer overdrafts and they often do not provide access to a cheque book. They do not provide the full menu of services that we would all expect.
For me, this is simple: the industry is failing to do anything about financial exclusion. With the present voluntary commitment, the sector lacks sufficient incentive to dedicate its resources to help to address the issue, not least because of its obsession with maximising shareholder value. Yes, it has a legal duty to do that, but that sometimes goes against its obligations to society, which has provided £1.3 trillion of support to the sector since they global financial crisis came to a head. In addition to supporting the motion, I would like us to introduce a universal banking service obligation, to prevent people from needing to go to the doorstep lenders in the first place.