Draft Over the Counter Derivatives, Central Counterparties and Trade Repositories (Amendment, Etc., and Transitional Provision) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 General Committees

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I am not the Scottish National party’s most regular contributor to this Committee, so I have some learning to do before I get to the level of knowledge that many people in this room have. I have a few questions in relation to the information that has been provided to us and also some of the information that has not been provided to us.

My first question is about the lack of consultation on this statutory instrument. The explanatory memorandum says clearly that no consultation has been undertaken on the instrument, although it says that the Government have been interacting with the Bank of England and the FCA in relation to the drafting of this regulation, which I appreciate. I am pleased that the Treasury put it online back in October so that people could access it. It would be useful to understand how many people engaged with that process. Were representations made by individuals and companies or those who use these regulations and are governed by them? If the Government put them online and only four people see them, there seems little point in doing so. The Government should publicise the fact that the regulations are online for people to comment on. Also, it would be useful for people who might want to comment to know that the Government take comments on board and might actually make changes to the draft instrument before it comes to Committee. Even the Minister’s making a statement to that effect would be useful for the people who think, “Is there a point in me spending my time writing a submission on this SI when the Government are just going to ignore me, anyway?” If the Government were willing to say that they would take on board representations, it would be helpful.

My second question is about the intragroup regime and the period of time when it will happen, which is a three-year period with the possibility for extensions, as the Minister mentioned. The explanatory notes state that

“equivalence decisions will be sought, allowing for the establishment of new permanent exemptions.”

I am not clear about the exact process for those equivalence decisions being made, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Oxford East. Are such decisions difficult to achieve or relatively smooth? If we have the three-year time period, will there be sufficient time for equivalence decisions to happen, and in adequate ways so that the legislation equivalence rules that we have going forward are appropriate? Does the Minister foresee that being a smooth or a difficult process, and, to allow those things to happen, will it require input from lots of people whom we have no control over?

My next point relates to no deal. The explanatory memorandum states that the Government do not anticipate no deal happening, although, since it was written, things look a little different from the Government’s point of view. I am still not particularly clear on any of the statutory instruments that come forward. A lot of them seem to be things to do with no deal as well as things to do with deal. I am not always entirely clear which bits relate to no deal and which bits relate to deal. Not necessarily for this instrument, but going forward, it might be better for the Government to be clearer in the explanatory memorandum about which parts of any SIs would be necessary in all outcomes for Brexit: which ones would be necessary in a no-deal scenario and also which ones would be necessary in a deal scenario, but not until the end of the implementation period. There are all these different outcomes, and I do not have the level of clarity needed. Given that we have quite a packed parliamentary agenda, it is difficult to spend a huge amount of time on legislation.gov.uk trying to find out all these bits of information.

The last point was in relation to the impact assessment. I managed to find the SI online. If you look on the back page there is a direct link to legislation.gov.uk—probably you never thought to look on the back page, but it is there. That takes you through the statutory instrument. I do not know whether it has got the explanatory memorandum there. On that web page, which I checked before I came here, it says that no impact assessment has been prepared for this SI—which is directly contradicted by the information that we have in the explanatory memorandum, which says that an impact assessment has been prepared—[Interruption.] I absolutely agree that it is a mess. I do not understand why, if the Government have prepared an impact assessment, we need to wait until the Regulatory Policy Committee sees the impact assessment before we can see it. Surely it could come to hon. Members, with the caveat that it has not been through that Committee? Then we would be in a position to make better decisions.

One of the lines in the explanatory memorandum says:

“It is difficult to quantify the size of the market affected as the instrument covers both the financial sector and non-financial counterparties”.

I would expect the impact assessment to cover that information and provide Committee Members with the information included. If the information is not there for the explanatory memorandum, I am concerned about how good the impact assessment must be—if it does not include proper information about the financial impact on various types of companies and organisations. The way this has been put together is not great. I am particularly concerned about the lack of an impact assessment. As I said, MPs do not have a huge amount of time right now. If we had been provided with the impact assessment at the outset, this meeting would have been a lot quicker, given that we would have been able to read all the information before coming here and easily have it to hand.

The fact that the shortened web address is written throughout the explanatory memorandum and the actual address is only at the very back is not particularly helpful. It means that MPs are wasting time trying to find these things, when the full web address could have been provided throughout the text of the explanatory memorandum.

To push on the point that the hon. Member for Oxford East made, if the Minister can give the Committee today a date when the impact assessment will come, or, at least, some kind of timeline, that would give us a level of comfort. Going forward, though, it is totally inappropriate for MPs to be asked to consider statutory instruments when an impact assessment has been written and is required, yet we are not provided with it until after we have considered the statutory instrument—at which point it is too late for us to make any changes to it. If the Minister could give some comfort and, going forward, look at any other SI Committees so that this shambles does not happen again, that would be incredibly helpful.

[Maria Eagle]

I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East on the points she made, and on some of the points made by the hon. Member for Aberdeen North. I was appointed to this Committee last week. I do not normally spend my time considering derivatives of the over-the-counter version—or any other kind. However, having spent many years as a Minister—and therefore knowing how to look at legislation—I found, when I looked at this instrument, something else that I would like to raise with the Minister. When I was a Minister I used to spend my time, before I came to Committees, making sure that my officials would bring along to the Committee all instruments referred to in the regulations, to enable the Committee, if it wished to look in detail at some wording, to be able to understand what that meant. I thought that having the other instruments in the Committee room was the norm. What we have here is an instrument that refers in terms, for example in part 2, to regulations from 2013, and then sets out:

“In regulation 2, in paragraph (1), for the definition of ‘the EMIR regulation’ substitute—

‘“the EMIR regulation” has the meaning given in section 313 of the Act;’.”

To understand the meaning of that, one has to have the regulation to hand. I do not see any copies of the regulation that the instrument refers to here. It was always the practice when I was in Government, and I am sure it was the practice of some Conservative members of the Committee who have been in Government in their time too, to have in Committee all the regulations referred to and being amended, so that if somebody had a particular point to make about a particular part we could see clearly what was being changed, what the implementation of that change would mean, and whether the wording appeared appropriated.

Here, we are left with nothing, in practice, but the explanatory memorandum. We have to take on trust—not that I am saying that I do not trust the Minister—that what we are being told in the explanatory memorandum is in fact being done by the wording that we see in the instrument. I think it is poor practice, if I might say so, and I hope that he will take this back to his Department, to come to Committee with instruments that effectively alter other regulations without making them available in the room. Any officials who had left me in that position as a Minister would have known about it. In fact, I used to ensure that such things were correct in Committee.

I know that there is a big burden of statutory instruments at present, and I understand that Ministers are hard pressed, but it is not right in terms of proper scrutiny for us not to be able to understand the meaning of the regulations. Regulations under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 are more complex than many because they often simply refer to amendments to primary legislation. Here we have a suite of three regulations, but I was not on the Committees that considered the other two.

It makes it increasingly difficult for an ordinary, intelligent person to understand what the hell is going on. That is not good for scrutiny, for the Minister, for the Government, or for good governance, and it leads us to the impression that what is happening is rushed, has not been thought through, and may be defective. If it is, it will not be possible for members of the Committee to pick up the defects. That is a real problem for proper parliamentary scrutiny.

My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East referred to part 2. When I was reading the explanatory memorandum, one of the things that jumped out at me, as it clearly jumped out at her, was in paragraph 7.16, on page 6:

“Part 2 of this instrument also introduces a power for the FCA to suspend the reporting obligation for a period of up to one year…in a scenario where there is no registered or recognised UK”

trade repository. I immediately wondered in what circumstances that might be the case. The Minister made a reference to that, and said that it would be highly unlikely—but it is not so unlikely that steps are not being taken in the instrument to deal with it.

Can the Minister tell me how many UK-registered trade repositories there are, and in what circumstances—unlikely though they might be—he envisages that this part of the instrument might have to come into force, or that the powers specified might have to be used? As he said, the whole purpose of the regulations, whether they are operated by EU institutions or by the Treasury, the Bank and the Financial Conduct Authority, is to try to prevent the disaster of the global financial crisis that resulted last time from insufficiently prudent, untransparent regulation of such trades. Will he give us a bit more detail about why he has felt it necessary to include such a provision in the regulations?

I agree with the remarks made thus far by my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East and others about the lack of any kind of impact assessment. It struck me that there is not even a guesstimate of the cost. Will the Minister tell us what trades we are talking about? If the regulations were referring to a couple of hundred thousand pounds a year, we would not worry as much about it as we would if we were dealing with the equivalent of a quarter or a half of our GDP. Will he tell us what level of financial dealings the regulations relate to?

[Kirsty Blackman]

I am struck that in these Committees, the Government do an impact assessment for more than £5 million of costs to businesses, but not for under £5 million of costs to businesses. If that is all the information we have to go on, that is sketchy, at best.

[Maria Eagle]

The hon. Lady makes a good point, and perhaps the Minister would like to comment on that as well.

The other point I would like to make is about the financial and resource burdens that the transfers made through the regulations will put on those who inherit the obligations and functions that used to be carried out by the EU institutions. That appears to be the Bank and the Prudential Regulation Authority part of it, the Financial Conduct Authority and, of course, the Treasury. There is nothing I can see that suggests that extra resources will be passed on to the FCA and the PRA part of the Bank for dealing with the additional obligations that the regulations place upon them. While they may well have experts in such instruments and this kind of trading already on their staff, the work that they are going to be expected to do as a consequence of the regulations, if they have to be used, would be different to the work they are already doing.

What financial provision are the Government making to ensure that the FCA and the Bank have the relevant staff and resourcing to do this very important job that he is asking us to bestow on them? There does not seem to be any information about the impact on those who will acquire the extra burdens of doing this work, or the likely cost to the Government, the Bank, the FCA and any other authorities, of carrying it out in a way that will work as well as their current arrangements.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Glen]

Because I wanted the opportunity to explain face to face in the Committee and, given the need to secure the SIs for industry, as I made clear in the quotation from TheCityUK, it is not the perfect process. [Interruption.] I understand the point that the hon. Lady makes but I think I have responded to it as reasonably as I can.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Lastly, although the Minister has not said it, it appears to me that the issue might be with the Regulatory Policy Committee not getting through the impact assessments that are sent to it. Given that we are going to have an awful lot of SIs and, presumably, an awful lot of impact assessments, that is likely to become more of a problem. Is it necessary for the assessment to go to the Regulatory Policy Committee? Is there a way we could see it without it going to the RPC?

[John Glen]

The responsibility rests ultimately with me and my officials, and I have to take it on board. It is for me to be accountable for the impact assessments—I am not blaming anyone else. I will continue to do everything I can over the coming hours and days.

The hon. Lady mentioned impact. The draft regulations will not place new regulatory burdens on UK firms. We expect a one-off familiarisation cost for legal experts to examine the draft regulations, which we estimate will have an impact on just over 400 firms and cost £350,000 in total.

The regulatory requirements for trade repositories as defined in title VII of EMIR, will remain largely unchanged. The FCA has been given the power to supervise trade repositories against those requirements, but it has been in close engagement with trade repositories to ensure that their transition is as smooth as possible. Trade repositories will have to familiarise themselves with changes to the supervision and enforcement procedures under the UK regime, but we do not anticipate that that will be burdensome or that the familiarisation costs will be high.

The hon. Member for Oxford East asked how likely the FCA is to use the power to suspend the reporting obligation. It is almost certain that it will not need to use that power because the trade repositories regulations enable it to process advance applications for new trade repositories, or convert authorisations for existing UK trade repositories, to ensure that the UK has operational trade repositories from exit day.