Future International Trade Opportunities

Debate between Gareth Thomas and Craig Tracey

Wednesday 1st May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Craig Tracey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One of the priorities of the Department for International Trade, in co-operation with the Department for International Development, is to look at how to replicate and increase the effects of the economic partnership agreements. There are with seven in place now, and we want to extend them to 31 other countries, including African and Caribbean ones. The opportunity is certainly out there, and I agree with him wholly.

We have made a good start. The Government’s stance in the White Paper on trade was encouraging:

“When we leave the EU we will regain our independent seat at the WTO. As an independent member and one of the largest economies in the world, we will be in a position to intensify our support for robust, free and open international trade rules which work for all, and to help to rebuild global momentum for trade liberalisation.”

We are already seeing encouraging signs. According to the OECD, at the end of last year the UK’s inward investment stock was an impressive $1.89 trillion, more than double Germany’s, which stood at $920 billion. The Government have already established working groups and high-level dialogues with a range of key trade partners, including the US, Australia, China, the Gulf Co-operation Council, India, Japan and New Zealand. I commend that approach, and I know that the Department plans and will work to extend that list, continuing to increase global trading relationships.

Analysis in a report by Minnesota’s Minneapolis Fed suggests that were we to reduce trade and investment barriers with the rest of the world by 5%, we would raise UK income by between £25 billion and £30 billion per year, even taking into account possible future restrictions on trade and investment with EU. Dr Graham Gudgin, an economist at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research, states:

“A smart WTO Brexit with well-designed trade, immigration, agricultural, fishing and regulatory policies would, far from being a ‘disaster’, have an excellent chance of delivering substantial long-term net benefits.”

Exciting opportunities across a wide range of sectors are open to Government as we move forward.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman must know that the most advanced example of trade liberalisation is actually the single market. Would it not therefore be better for Britain to remain a member of the single market?

[Craig Tracey]

The hon. Gentleman will not be surprised that I disagree. One of the issues with the single market is freedom of movement, which was an issue in the referendum, and similarly the customs union ties our freedom of policy. Being able to develop our own wider trade policies offers far more exciting possibilities to my constituents and to businesses around the country.

Speaking of my part of the country, it is good to see that, primarily as a result of Brexit, a new strategy is forming. Traditionally, parts of the midlands have tended to work separately on their trade policies, but through initiatives such as the midlands engine they are working much more closely together, with a great sense of teamwork and unity, and more joined-up thinking to deliver a wider, more focused outlook, which is to the benefit of the midlands as a whole.

I raise my main topic today as one who was an insurance broker for more than 20 years and as chair of the all-party group for insurance and financial services. I will focus my comments on this sector, because insurance has to play a leading role in our future trade success. It is fundamental to economic improvement in every one of our constituencies, and is apparently one of the UK’s most successful export industries.

I say that insurance is important in all our constituencies because overall it employs about 300,000 people and, contrary to popular belief, two thirds of those jobs are outside London. The specialist London market itself employs about 52,000 people, but again, 17,000 of those jobs are outside London. In terms of premium income, the UK market is bigger than all the markets of its major competitors—Bermuda, Singapore and Zurich—combined. This country attracts large commercial business from more than 200 territories around the world, bringing to the UK about £65 billion of premium annually. On top of that, we have a reputation for product innovation to cover new types of risk. That is important as technology grows. Some of the products recently developed in London include cyber and data-breach insurance, stand-alone terrorist cover and natural catastrophe cover.

We cannot afford to be complacent about the industry, though. Research by the London Market Group, highlighted that premium coming from emerging markets into the UK has declined and that we face significant and growing competition from overseas, especially from markets in Bermuda, Singapore and Zurich, whose Governments support regulators that actively promote their industries and insurance markets. Meanwhile, our share of mature insurance and reinsurance markets stagnates. Asia is the highest growth market globally, and the region in which the UK lost the most ground in commercial insurance between 2013 and 2015, mainly to growing regional insurance hubs such as, again, Singapore, which had an annual growth rate of 4%.

[Craig Tracey]

Although the US is one of our biggest import markets, I do not necessarily think so, because the Government have committed to maintaining high food standards. I am primarily talking about the insurance industry; I am sure the Minister can give some reassurance, but I think there is plenty of scope for us to grow imports from a whole range of countries around the world. The scope of where our imports come from seems to be very narrow.

[Gareth Thomas]

Research published in December by the Centre for European Reform suggests that if Britain leaves the single market, even with an ambitious future trade agreement with the European Union, exports of insurance and pension services from the UK would be almost 20% lower per year. Does the hon. Gentleman think that, however difficult it would be to present it to his constituents, staying in the single market might be the best way to protect a considerable number of insurance jobs in his constituency and elsewhere?

[Craig Tracey]

I do not. I have spoken to a wide range of stakeholders, including the London Market Group, Lloyd’s and the Association of British Insurers. I will make the point later that from their perspective, even free trade agreements are not necessarily the way forward.

Returning to the trend of the loss of global market share by UK commercial insurance, it is particularly important that the Government and industry consider the measures that can be introduced to reverse that trend, to encourage more trade and opportunities and, crucially, to promote the industry. It has long been argued in the insurance sector, and is something I have raised many times in this House, that our regulators should have a dual role—they should promote on the international stage. That would mirror what many of our competitors around the world already do, particularly in emerging areas.

We need domestic reform just to put us on a level footing with our competitors. UK regulators should have a regard for our international competitiveness. That means they would have to consider the impact of their decisions on the ability of UK-based financial services to compete on the international stage that we want to have access to. The sector has repeatedly made the point that progress does not necessarily rely on agreeing formal free trade agreements—they are not the be-all and end-all. The Government can make substantial progress now using some of the existing tools available to them such as financial and economic dialogues, which offer real benefits in shorter time frames. There would be an opportunity to turn them into bilateral agreements in future—the ABI highlighted that in relation to China and India in particular.

To remain internationally competitive, a future regulatory framework needs to be outcome-based. There is a view that trade should not be prevented by technical divergence between the UK and third countries if the outcome of the regulation is the same. So that we are not overtaken, it is important that Government, in partnership with organisations such as the LMG or the ABI, promote the unique benefit of access to our commercial insurance markets, given the significant economic and social benefits of expanding insurance provision and the growing protection gap challenge that many countries face.

I would like to draw the Minister’s attention to the London Makes it Possible campaign, run by the London Market Group. It is designed to promote London and the UK as the world’s pre-eminent insurance hub. It reminds countries around the world of the business range of risks we cover and is something that Government could get behind, to promote us. It has a fantastic website, where it is interesting to see some of the world-leading risks that we cover, and how our market is so different.

The expertise in this country enables us to place highly complex risks. The question is: where should we consider targeting? There are opportunities to grow the insurance trade in a number of developed and emerging markets. The ABI has identified 11 priority markets for future international trade, including China, India, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland and the United States. In addition, the LMG has identified its own target markets: the US again and the markets of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which have huge cyber-insurance opportunities. Latin America has one of the lowest insurance penetrations in the world, largely due to measures to shield those countries from international insurance markets. Although it is understandable why they may want to do that, those measures limit the pooling of risk and make the insurance of large-scale natural disasters next to impossible. Importantly, that puts up costs for consumers and reduces take-up.

I visited the US last year with the British-American parliamentary group, to discuss financial services post-Brexit. We went to Washington and New York to see at first hand how important our insurance industry is there. The US continues to be the London Market Group’s single biggest source of business. In 2017, Lloyd’s under- writers wrote approximately £13.5 billion of US business, contributing to a total of approximately £20 billion of London Market Group premiums. The US spend on cyber-insurance alone is expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2020. It also faces a growing need to strengthen resilience against natural disaster and to bolster federal and state insurance programmes. The three hurricanes in 2017 caused more than $217 billion-worth of damage, of which only $92 billion was covered by insurance.

The Government have already made important progress in negotiating and signing the UK-US covered agreement for reinsurance, which removes some collateral requirements and encourages regulatory dialogue between the UK and US. That is a very welcome step to developing a new post-Brexit trading relationship between the two countries. The UK is ready to take advantages of those opportunities. World-leading insurance expertise is already based in this country so it will be a critical industry for us.

Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [Lords]

Debate between Gareth Thomas and Craig Tracey

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 24th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)]

First, I should like to declare an interest as the current chair of the all-party parliamentary group on insurance and financial services. I welcome the Bill, because it will tackle some of the important issues that my constituents talk about. It includes a commitment to ban cold calling relating to pensions and to the creation of a single financial guidance body—an SFGB. I know that this approach also has the broad support of the insurance and financial services industry, but it is important that the SFGB should work with all stakeholders to fulfil its objective and of course ensure good consumer outcomes. With the Bill, we have an excellent opportunity to improve financial resilience by promoting early intervention to help to prepare people for income shocks and life events. These preparations include planning ahead for care and understanding the benefits of protection products such as income protection insurance, critical illness insurance and life insurance.

There is a lot in the Bill that I could talk about, but given the time constraints, I want specifically to speak against new clause 8, which seeks to put a duty on the Financial Conduct Authority to ban unsolicited direct approaches by claims management services. I agree with the Government that the Information Commissioner’s Office is best placed to implement any ban and that existing legislation means that data gained illegally is already restricted. However, I agree that there is an urgent need for reform relating to claims management companies.

Previously, there have been calls for the FCA to assume responsibility for CMCs, so the fact that the Government have taken action on this is to be warmly welcomed. The Association of British Insurers has stated:

“Confirmation of tougher regulation of claims management companies cannot come soon enough for people who are plagued by unsolicited calls and texts. Disreputable firms are fuelling a compensation culture that contributes to higher insurance costs for many.”

Last year alone, there was a total of 752 authorised personal injury CMCs, more than in any other claims sector, including PPI. Measures in the Bill will go some way towards tackling bad practice in the personal injury claims market, which has been costly for insurance companies, put up premiums for consumers and frequently delivered outcomes in which claimants’ interests were not put first.

Added to some of the measures in the forthcoming Civil Liability Bill, such as tackling the high frequency of whiplash claims, this Bill will help to ensure the success of the Government’s wider efforts to tackle these problem areas. It is therefore encouraging that the insurance industry has expressed confidence in the FCA’s more robust regulatory regime and its ability to properly oversee these firms, citing two significant benefits, both of which will play a vital role in addressing the problems associated with this sector.

First, a strong regime based on understanding the business models of individual CMCs will prevent firms that do not offer good value to consumers from operating. Secondly, personal accountability for senior managers of CMCs will ensure that when a firm struck off, its directors cannot simply resurface as a new CMC, as is currently happening. It is anticipated that, as a result of this change, consumers will be given more information about the services that CMCs offer and more transparency about the fee structure. It is therefore important that the improved regulation of CMCs should be implemented alongside the personal injury reform proposed in the Civil Liability Bill. It can only be good news for consumers when their interests are put above all others.

As I have said, this is an excellent Bill, but I would like to propose a couple of areas in which I think it could be strengthened, and I ask the Minister to take them into consideration when summing up. First, it would be useful if he clarified the exact scope of the services that the SFGB will provide for consumers. There is a great opportunity to look at how the Department for Work and Pensions could work with the financial services industry to make guidance a recognised norm and to look at ways to support interventions that could improve the retirement process, such as the introduction of a mid-life MOT.

Secondly, will the Minister provide a timeline for the introduction of the FSGB and tell us when the FCA will assume responsibility for CMCs? Swift action is necessary, particularly in relation to CMCs, given the drastic spike in claims relating to gastric illnesses by people who have been on holiday. It is no coincidence that this surge has coincided with CMCs preparing for the deadline for bringing PPI claims and the introduction of measures to tackle whiplash claim frequency.

The Opposition amendments to this part of the Bill are unnecessary. The Government are committed to banning cold calling in relation to pensions and by CMCs. Moreover, they and the SFGB will keep cold calling under review. If the Minister will give consideration in his summing up to the points I have made, I will have no hesitation in supporting the Government through the Bill’s remaining stages.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to speak to the three amendments in my name. According to a recent Bank of England survey, the average level of household debt, excluding mortgages, is £8,000. While everybody should be able to access basic debt advice, people on low incomes with much higher levels of debt, at higher rates of interest, clearly need significant support. Unlike in the United States, it is difficult to work out with any certainty where such people are living in the UK, beyond relying on an individual to approach their local citizens advice bureau or another advice service.

At present, the new financial guidance body will not have access to data to allow for a detailed mapping of debt at a local level. Indeed, it will not have access to a full picture of the activity of banks and other lenders in our communities. There is no requirement on banks, payday lenders and other financial services providers to be fully transparent about the services in each of our constituencies—specifically where they lend, what rate they lend at, and the types of loan that they offer. Were that data available to public bodies, it would allow for the accurate mapping of who is lending and what is being loaned. Banks and other lenders do hold such data down to postcode level, and such data are released in the United States. Many British lenders that are active in the US are used to releasing that information, which allows public bodies to map the activities of banks and other lenders.

My amendments 1 and 2 would allow the single financial guidance body to facilitate the release of that information by lenders in an anonymised form so that we could know where debt is concentrated and what types of credit are used in different areas. That would allow for better, more strategic responses to the household debt crisis with which the House is familiar. The data would help to inform where to target the debt advice funding that the SFGB will dispense, encourage more engagement between mainstream lenders, and allow the community finance sector to scale up the provision of affordable credit in areas where there are specific problems. Indeed, such data would reveal market gaps and the communities excluded from mainstream credit.

Fair access to financial goods and services is a basic requirement for full engagement in modern society, but Thamesmead, an estate of 55,000 people in south-east London, has not been home to a mainstream bank branch for a long while. Charities report anecdotally that high-cost credit lenders such as doorstep or payday lenders are very active. More and more bank branches are being closed by the big banks, which is leaving whole communities, some in the poorest areas of our country, without a single mainstream bank branch. Thamesmead is not an isolated example.

At the same time, rumours persist that the big banks want to pull the plug on free cash machines. Which? has reported that over 200 communities in Britain already have poor ATM provision or no cash machines at all. The combination of a lack of access to cash machines and to mainstream bank branches could create the space for a much bigger increase in the activities of high-cost credit companies, doorstep or payday lenders or, worst of all, illegal loan sharks, as a response to the needs of people in such communities for short-term loans. We need to know where the other Thamesmeads are across the country so that charities, community banks and credit unions can be supported by the financial guidance body and other statutory bodies to target financial exclusion in such areas by signposting people to responsible financial providers.

In 2015, when considering this specific problem, the Financial Inclusion Commission, which was set up by the Government, argued for a much wider level of data disclosure to develop a greater understanding of the problem. It said specifically:

“If lenders were required to disclose data by postcode on credit applications and rejections, policymakers would be better able to understand the scale and shape of the low income credit gap.”

Since the financial crisis, banks and other lenders have withdrawn from higher-risk lending and raised the threshold for accessing mainstream credit. In turn, this has restricted the credit available to those with low credit scores, leaving them at the mercy of higher-cost lenders to bridge their income gap. Surely part of the long-term solution to the household debt crisis is to make it easier for low-cost credit providers and other alternatives.

It is true, as Ministers have previously suggested in Committee and in a letter to me, that there are other sources of data on debt. The Office for National Statistics and the Bank of England publish data on lending, but only at UK level—the data is not broken down by constituency or by area. StepChange, too, publishes some data on lending, as does the Money Advice Service, but the Minister might not be aware that it publishes only estimates of the number of people who are over-indebted.

I would not dream of criticising the Money Advice Service, but its data on lending does not go anywhere like far enough to meet the recommendations of the Financial Inclusion Commission. The Money Advice Service does not routinely collect information about the extent of debt problems at the most local level. Its last significant report was back in March 2016, and it set out estimates of the number of over-indebted households down to local authority level, not postcode level, which is what we need. The Money Advice Service data are estimates based on survey work, not actual individuals who take out loans.

I should be clear that some lending data is already released. The coalition Government, to their credit, required the British Bankers Association, which is now UK Finance, and the Council of Mortgage Lenders voluntarily to publish some data by postcode, primarily to try to tackle the challenges that small businesses were facing when accessing credit.

There are problems with the data. For example, it does not include high-cost, short-term credit—payday lenders. Additionally, it does not disclose lending levels or rates at postcode level. Some details of loan applications and credit providers’ registers are not released either, so a full picture of the level of lending at a postcode level has not yet been able to emerge.

At the moment, the data is released voluntarily. Legal underpinning is needed so that more statutory bodies working in this field can more easily negotiate improvements in data. Specifically in this context, for example, the single financial guidance body should be able better to negotiate the release of the data that it needs.

I say this gently to the Economic Secretary, who will be very helpful to me tomorrow, but efforts to re-engage the Treasury in getting UK Finance to improve the usefulness of the data its members release have not had much success recently. At the very least, I hope he will be willing to join me in meeting national groups operating in this field to hear their concerns about the data, and perhaps he might be willing to use his leverage to get at least small improvements in that area.

In the United States, the Community Reinvestment Act means that banks and other lenders have to report what they are lending, where to and at what rate. The disclosure requirements are critical as they enable independent, informed assessments of what the banks are doing. Crucially, they keep the banks honest. Before the CRA, access to credit was scarce in deprived areas, and that lack of access contributed to and prolonged the decline and deprivation in such communities.