Financial Services Bill

Lord Jopling Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 28th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I begin by drawing attention to my interests in the register. The House has heard two outstanding maiden speeches today. I doubt the House of Lords has seen the introduction of two individuals with such extraordinarily wide qualifications for many years, and we certainly welcome them very much.

The Government have told us that one objective of the Bill concerning financial services is to promote openness between the United Kingdom and internal markets. Obviously that is a laudable notion, which is important to the UK because our financial services are in many ways the golden nugget of the UK economy. I want to ask the Minister to give us an assessment of how such an aim is achievable and to report on progress over the past few years, and particularly recently, on achieving that greater openness. To what extent since Brexit are other countries also showing preparedness to negotiate towards that goal?

For a start, I cannot imagine that the European Union will resist the temptation to shift some of the pre-eminence of the City of London to Paris and Frankfurt. That point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Reid, and my noble friend Lord Bridges. So far as the EU is concerned, it will be a case of holding on to what we have got and trying to avoid the power of the City and British financial services ebbing away to the continent. However, that is not the main point that I want to raise.

I am concerned at the prospect of opening up the financial markets between the United Kingdom, the United States and others. Some years ago, when the European Union was negotiating the TTIP agreement with the United States, I went on a Select Committee visit to Washington as part of our inquiry into the progress of the TTIP negotiations. Of course, reflecting on the strength of the City and the United Kingdom’s powerful financial services sector, one of Britain’s main aims, while we were still members of the EU, was to enhance the prospects of the pre-eminence of the City within those negotiations with the United States. Indeed, one of our principal aims was to open up the financial sector between the US and the EU, as it was then. Now, after Brexit, that must obviously continue to be a major aim of the UK but all of us who went on that delegation to Washington, some years ago now, were seriously shocked, when meeting the United States Treasury at that time, to be told in the firmest possible way that there was no way at all that the United States was prepared to open up the financial services sector within the confines of the TTIP negotiations. In strident, almost offensive terms, we were told to forget it.

That is very concerning for the future. I have heard no evidence since then that the attitude of the United States has softened so far as financial services are concerned. I have two questions to the Minister, which I hope he will refer to in his wind-up; if he cannot do so, perhaps he will be good enough to write to me. First, has there been any softening in the attitude of the United States to protect its financial services sector and open it up to the UK or others? Secondly, does he see any prospect of fulfilling the Government’s aim of opening up these markets, especially within the United States?