Financial Conduct Authority

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Guto Bebb

Monday 1st February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) and to learn the phrase, “Couldn’t run a ménage”, which I hope will replace, “Couldn’t run a whelk stall”. I have always thought that was probably rather difficult anyway, so “ménage” is a better term.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) on bringing forward this debate and on his amazing achievement in getting some redress of grievance not only for his own constituents but for many of our constituents, mine included. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation behaved quite disgracefully towards one of my constituents. It sold an interest rate swap that was larger than the loan outstanding—it was a condition of the loan taken out —and then, when interest rates fell, it revalued the loan to say that his loaned value was beneath the required level. It therefore put him in special measures and started to impose penal interest rates, and then when I got in touch, it said that under data protection it could not talk to me. The whole story was really quite disgraceful and not what one would expect of a major banking corporation. We are all very grateful for what has been done to get some redress for this.

I must refer to my declaration of interests. I am regulated by the FCA and have been for many years. I was regulated by its predecessor body, the FSA, and before that, going back to the mid-1990s, by IMRO—the Investment Management Regulatory Organisation. I do not think I have Stockholm syndrome, but I have to tell the House that I cannot support my hon. Friend’s motion. That is not because I do not think there have been errors of regulation—there have. We know only too well that the tripartite system of regulation prior to the crash in 2008 was a failure—nobody knew precisely who was in charge of what aspect of regulation and how it was to be managed, and in the end nobody was doing it at all. The FCA, however, was only introduced in 2013 and a lot of the problems to which hon. Members have referred predate its creation. This House legislated in the previous Session to try to deal with the problem, so this motion has been tabled much too early, because the FCA has not had the chance to prove that it is different from the FSA. The FSA undoubtedly failed, which is why this House abolished it.

[Guto Bebb]

I appreciate the points my hon. Friend is making—they are entirely reasonable—but I think that the difference between the FSA and FCA is being over-emphasised. The people who were FSA officers when the all-party group on interest rate swap mis-selling was established were the same people as the FCA officers who attended our first meeting after the FCA was established. I think that the degree of change is being overstated.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I do not agree with my hon. Friend on this occasion. Inevitably, some employees remained the same. It would have been extraordinary if all the regulators at the FSA had been fired and sent off to the great regulatory house in the sky. The powers and the responsibilities of the FCA were changed and, indeed, it has carried out an investigation.

The FCA has to be judicious and bear in mind that some people took out swaps knowing full well what they were doing. Not every swap that was sold was mis-sold. Interest rate swaps are a very important safeguard for people who are uncertain of the direction of interest rates. Indeed, with interest rates at their current lows, many people may feel that it is prudent to protect themselves by taking out an interest rate swap. It would be wrong to so overtighten regulation or to be so sensitive to what happened in the past to make beneficial financial instruments unavailable because of historical mis-selling. Each case needs to be looked at on its merits.

When I first took out a mortgage, I did so at a fixed rate because I knew I could afford to pay that rate but was uncertain about whether I could pay a higher rate. That is a prudent and sensible thing for people to do when engaging with the financial sector. The FCA had a big job of work to do in a quasi-judicial role. It could not just arbitrarily decide that all cases were mis-sellings and therefore they all had to be compensated for.

This House, too, needs to be judicious. The motion is really serious. It says that we have no confidence in an arm’s length independent regulator that this House established just three years ago. If we really mean that, we ought to be legislating to create a new one. We should not simply pass a motion; we should say that the body has failed, that it will be abolished as of 1 April and that a new one will be created.

This motion represents an intermediate step whereby the House faces one of two risks. One is that it is passed this evening and, like many other Backbench Business motions, absolutely nothing follows from it. This House would then look foolish. It would look as if whatever we say makes no difference and we would have no future power to bring our authority to bear on independent regulators when things may be more serious.

The other risk is that the chairman of the FCA feels that he has to resign and take responsibility, because there is no chief executive of the moment, which makes this a very strange time to be holding this debate. If the chairman falls on his sword, what would we achieve? One person would go, but the organisation would remain intact because we have not legislated to replace it.

This House should be proud of its constitutional standing and recognise the extraordinary power it has. We can summon people to the Bar of the House if we are sufficiently annoyed with the way they conduct themselves. We can make them answer to Select Committees, and indeed we do. However, if we use that power without due consideration, without being certain and without having every fact at our fingertips that this body, not its predecessors, is the one in which we have no confidence, we undermine the standing of the House of Commons and its ability to do that in future when our case may be better founded.