Financial Services Bill

David Mowat Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Neil Parish]

That is absolutely right. Many of the people taking out these loans earn less than £15,500 a year and therefore cannot afford the loan in the first place. I have sympathy for their position, but are we really helping them by allowing them to get into the hands of loan sharks, which results in their having to pay back huge amounts of money that they simply do not have?

I have made the point before that if financial companies and loan sharks are arguing that they need to charge huge amounts of interest because people are such a high security risk, they should not be lending them the money in the first place. Let us remember the old adage about finance: these companies will lend us an umbrella when the sun is shining, but they will take it away again as soon as it starts to rain. In the circumstances that we are describing, they should never have made the loans in the first place. Citizens Advice and financial advisers often tell us about people who have got themselves into huge amounts of debt, perhaps through no fault of their own.

It needs to be made absolutely clear to people what to expect. I am not a great believer in huge amounts of regulation, but I do believe that the consumer should be able to see exactly what they are signing up to at the outset, and be made fully aware of the consequences of their actions. They often do not understand the terms if they are hidden in the small print or expressed as complicated percentages, but if they were told, “You can borrow £100, but if you don’t pay it back on time, you could end up paying £2,000 back”, it might make them sit up and think about exactly what they were borrowing. They might then choose not to do it, or to go to someone who could lend them the money at a better rate.

The Government are doing a great deal to increase the use of credit unions, and we need to do much more work on that. Perhaps we should look into ways of financing them. I have a very successful one in my constituency, and we need to build on that. Only a small percentage of people here borrow money from credit unions, unlike in Ireland, where almost 50% of people have access to such loans.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

My hon. Friend mentioned Wonga, and he was right to suggest that 4,000% is an absurd rate of interest. Does he have a view on the rate at which interest should be capped for a fortnight’s payday loan?

[Neil Parish]

Yes, I do. Many people in the banking sector would probably disagree, but I believe that anything over 50% is far too high. It is obscene and immoral to allow companies to go on charging vast amounts of interest—I do not care who they are—and that is why we have to take action. I am looking to the Government to do so, not only through legislation but through stating that such companies should clearly set out their rates of interest and the consequences of non-repayment, so that our constituents can take advantage of credit that is competitive and that will not ruin them.

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[Chris Leslie]

This goes back to the odd statement from the Minister in Committee, when he said it would be wrong for the Bank of England and the FPC to be asked to have regard to the impact of its decision on economic growth and employment. I ask the hon. Gentleman to pause and reflect on what he is saying, which is that it is not the Bank’s and the FPC’s job to think about jobs and growth. If he goes to his electorate and says that that is what he is legislating for, I doubt he will get much of a response, but it is important. The FPC will be a vital player in our economy. The Monetary Policy Committee has this objective in its remit; it seems only reasonable to have it mirrored in the Financial Policy Committee’s remit.

This attitude, which we called the Fareham doctrine of compartmentalism, that it is for the Treasury alone to think about jobs and growth—that it would be wrong and somehow dangerous for the Bank of England to think about such issues too—is an extremely dangerous way to think about this vital and extremely powerful institution. The Chair of the Treasury Committee said that, in certain ways, the Governor of the Bank of England could become even more powerful than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I want all the players in our economy to be thinking about the impact of their decisions on our constituents, their employment prospects, their business prospects and the prospects of growth.

I think the amendment should be made. It is exceptionally important, and I feel strongly that we should press the matter. In a sense, it is similar to amendment 24. In the Bill, we enter new verbal territory with descriptions of how policy will be made. I know that many Members are intimately familiar with macro-prudential regulation, but essentially, it is that suite of rules and powers that the Bank of England and the FPC will be able to use to intervene in their systemic oversight of the economy as a whole. We suggest simply that every time the Bank of England produces a financial stability report it should give an assessment of the impact that each of the new macro-prudential measures will have on employment and growth—a simple assessment of their impact on the real economy. As the Bill stands, there is no requirement on the Bank of England, when exercising those massive powers, to provide that assessment. As the House knows, in many policy areas, we require frequent regulatory impact assessments to be made; this is a parallel requirement. We want the Bank of England properly to analyse the impact of the measures.

Let me give hon. Members some examples, so that they understand what macro-prudential regulation is. It is about setting maximum leverage ratios; sectoral capital requirements; rules on the terms of or the conditions on a loan, either to businesses or to consumers; loan-to-value ratios and loan-to-income ratios in mortgages; haircuts on secured finances or derivative transactions; disclosure requirements; and minimum credit card repayment levels. All those things are of real and great concern to our constituents. If the FPC and the Bank are able to assess the impact of their policies on credit availability, they should also be able to assess and analyse their impact on jobs and growth. Amendment 24 would achieve that.

[David Mowat]

I thank the shadow Minister for his lecture on macro-prudential tools. I was on the Joint Committee and I certainly did not recommend the inclusion of a growth objective, because I believe that stability and growth are potentially competing objectives. We are passing the Bill because of what happened in October 2008. I was concerned that anything that diluted the absolute requirement for stability might give an excuse for failure, which I did not want to arise.

[Chris Leslie]

It was the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself who warned against the stability of the graveyard. We have to have joined-up Government and co-ordinated economic policy—I hope hon. Members accept at least that much. It should not be impossible to ask the Bank of England simply to have regard to Her Majesty’s Government’s strategy—not the Opposition’s; obviously, ours would be different—and objectives on growth and jobs. That is all we are saying. We are not saying that that should overrule the broader stability objective of the FPC. It is a simple bit of wiring to make sure that we have joined-up Government and that all the branches of Government talk to one another.

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Finally, amendment 28 would leave out clause 5 altogether. It was with great regret that I decided that we needed to table the amendment, but the Bill is deficient in so many ways, as the hon. Member for Chichester suggested, that we felt we needed to address it. There is: the mismatch with the European regulators, which risks the further dilution of UK influence; the cost of having multiple regulators with insufficient effort to bear down on wasted duplication; the lack of a clear focus on tackling financial exclusion for those on the lowest incomes; poor scrutiny of the new rules that the regulators will generate; and insufficient transparency about the regulators and how they will reach decisions. It is for those reasons that we think that the Government have to go back to the drawing board and rethink, clarify and amend clause 5. The House of Commons should not have to approve such poorly drafted and inadequate arrangements for the FCA and the PRA. We hope that improvements can be made in the House of Lords.

[David Mowat]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Leslie]

I was just coming to my conclusion and am conscious that other Members wish to speak, so I will not give way. I simply urge the House to vote for the amendment in the hope that the House of Lords will improve clause 5.

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[Mark Field]

It is a pleasure to be part and parcel of such an interesting debate. I especially commend the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie). The hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) also made a thoughtful contribution, which covered a range of issues. As he said, it is regrettable that much of the real scrutiny of the Bill will be carried out in the other place, partly because of the guillotine but also because of the way in which votes on amendments are driven through here. I do not think that that reflects at all well on the House of Commons, which should be a place for genuine scrutiny rather than one that railroads Bills through their stages.

I do not go quite as far as the hon. Member for Nottingham East does in amendment 28. I do not think that we should get rid of clause 5 altogether. However, there is little doubt that the regulatory changes proposed in the clause, and the creation of the new supervisory architecture, will do little to address some of the significant risks that currently exist in the market. I say that as someone who speaks to practitioners every day in my role as Member of Parliament for the City of London.

A central issue is the ability of the FCA to carry out prudential regulation of firms that have sizeable assets and, often, complex structures. The recent failure of firms such as MF Global, Arch Cru and Keydata—all of which would have been prudentially regulated by the FCA—demonstrates the need for firms that have sizeable assets and are engaged in complex activities to be properly managed. One outcome of the failure of those firms has been that the liabilities of other UK businesses to the financial services compensation scheme are increasing in line with larger payouts to UK consumers. A wider effect has been that smaller and more innovative companies which, by their very nature, have less capital available to pay compensation on behalf of other firms face increased risk and rising costs. That will ultimately erode the attractiveness of London and, indeed, the UK as a venue for financial services businesses.

The FCA will not be a specialist prudential regulator. The experts will be located in the Prudential Regulation Authority, and it will be important for the FCA to work closely with the PRA to ensure that complex firms within its scope receive an adequate quality of prudential regulation. It is therefore crucial for the Bill to contain adequate safeguards and assurances that robust information-sharing agreements will exist between the two regulators. That important detail is lacking in both the Bill and the draft memorandum of understanding.

The Government should provide greater protections in clause 5, specifically in regard to the relationship between the FCA and the PRA. That would enable the two regulators to share information on systematically important companies to ensure that the PRA could make a judgment on whether they needed macro-prudential regulation. A key question is whether the FSA has learned from the problems of Lehman Brothers and the events of the past three and a half years or so. Despite the financial crisis, the FSA has failed to adjust the manner in which it supervises firms. The Turner review, published in 2009, provides a detailed analysis of the causes of the economic crisis and the areas of the financial and economic system in which the FSA and other, global regulators failed to identify growing problems.

The review promised a new philosophy of regulation that it describes as “intensive supervision”. That amounts to a huge number of new initiatives and commitments: a significant increase in the resources to be devoted to the supervision of high-impact firms; an increase in the resources devoted to sectoral and firm comparator analysis; investments in specialist skills, with supervisory teams able to draw on enhanced central expert resources; a much more intensive analysis of information relating to key risks; and an investment in specialist prudential skills.

Three years on from the publication of the Turner review, the FSA has increased the number of conduct interventions, a proportion of which have not involved consumer detriment—for example, in client asset and financial crime cases—but it has not been able to prevent the failure of a number of non-systemic companies.

The most worrying feature of what is going on at present, with the collapse of MF Global, Arch Cru and Keydata, is that under the new regulatory system they will all be prudentially managed by the FCA. It is set to be a competent financial conduct regulator, but it is no secret that it is not an expert prudential regulator. The prudential experts will all be located in the PRA. That is fine when the firms that are prudentially regulated by the FCA are small and relatively straightforward with few systemic risks, but none of the three firms to which I have referred can be regarded as small or straightforward businesses.

We are going to hear a lot more about MF Global in this House in months and years to come. It was involved in complex transactions as an intermediary on a range of financial products. The estimated gap owed by MF Global to futures customers is as large as $1.6 billion following bankruptcy. The total cost for MF Global UK has been estimated in the region of £600 million, and about $1 billion of client money remains locked in other financial institutions according to its administrators, KPMG. The total liability to consumers when Arch Cru collapsed was some £100 million, and a £54 million financial redress scheme was agreed between the FSA and the other professional organisations, Capita, HSBC and BNY Mellon.

[David Mowat]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s comments about MF Global and the fact that we did not learn quickly enough the lessons of that or of Lehman. Is there not one major aspect, however, that the Bill does not address particularly well, perhaps because it cannot: the fact that the regulation of such firms must mirror their organisational structure, which is international? Neither the FCA nor the PRA, nor any other regulatory body, can do that without much more effort being made.

[Mark Field]

I do not disagree with what my hon. Friend says. However, the special administration in respect of MF Global—which, as I have said, will be high profile in years to come—seems to be considerably better organised in every other jurisdiction than it is in the UK. That is doing great damage to the reputation of the UK as a destination for financial services.

Following the failure of the firms to which I have referred, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme has announced it will need to raise an additional £60 million in the investment intermediation sub-class, resulting in rising costs for firms in that category, and in the coming year both MF Global and Arch Cru will, I fear, generate further liabilities of some £600 million or more.