Financial Services Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

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

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I very much welcome this Bill. As the chair of the cross-industry Enforcement Law Review Group, I will concentrate very much on Clause 34, which I and many others welcome. I anticipate that there will be a number of amendments trying to get to the bottom of exactly how the Government see it operating, and I should be enormously grateful if the Minister could circulate to me the current draft of the regulations, so that we shall be talking to each other off the same hymn sheet, as it were, in Committee.

I very much encourage the Government to bring forward these regulations swiftly, and I encourage the Opposition to support the Government. There will be an obvious need for them as we come out of Covid, and I do not believe that, given the state of the debt advice industry, there is any quick perfectibility on offer. It would be far better to get something up and running, to review it pretty swiftly—perhaps after six months—and to produce a better version then and a better version a year or two after that. This is something that the industry will learn to work with, and we should aim at the start not for perfection but for something practical and effective.