Financial Services Bill

Lord Sharpe of Epsom Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 24th February 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sheehan (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. We are often in agreement. The point that she raises about ESG is pertinent and, sadly, it is not mandatory. We are seeing a continued increase in the billions of pounds and dollars being spent on fossil fuel infrastructure.

The young people whose futures will be mostly affected by what we do today are increasingly calling for action across all sectors, as demonstrated by the worldwide UNDP poll of 1.2 million people that I cited at Second Reading. I should also put on record that the poll carried out by YouGov last October at the behest of Global Witness showed that two-thirds of the British public want the UK to be a world leader on climate change. In fact, the highest percentage of those was recorded in Scotland at 69%.

The Bill depicts the landscape that will drive the investment of billions of pounds at a crucial juncture in our country’s history to reshape our future financial services post Brexit. The legislation will form the basis of how investment decisions will be regulated as we spend massive amounts of taxpayer money to build back better post Covid. Serendipitously, the Bill also comes at a time when we will be in pole position to provide global leadership through COP 26 and the G7. Italy, our co-host for COP 26, will then host the G20. We have an opportunity to showcase the route map presented to us by the Climate Change Committee’s recent report to get us to net zero by 2050, while steering a course to meeting the Paris goals. What an opportunity.

The Covid-19 pandemic has focused minds on what can happen when we push natural ecosystems too far, and I agree with every word of the contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. However, the timeframes to get innovative technological solutions engineered to scale to tackle climate change are substantially longer than those needed for vaccines—and they were long enough and overturned by human endeavour, hopefully just in time. Decisions have to be taken now if we are to reach net zero by 2050, and we have to get it right because we are in the last chance saloon.

Governments do not have the sums that will be needed, so we need private sector money too, and pots of it. However, business needs certainty and absolute clarity about which way the wind is blowing politically.

It is getting clarity from one quarter. Here is an extract from the letter sent by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink in 2021 to client CEOs. I remind the Committee that BlackRock’s assets under management come to, give or take, $7 trillion. This is what he said:

“BlackRock is a fiduciary to our clients … This is why I write to you each year, seeking to highlight issues that are pivotal to creating durable value—issues such as capital management, long-term strategy, purpose, and climate change.”


He went on to remind client CEOs:

“In January of last year, I wrote that climate risk is investment risk.”


I repeat: climate risk is investment risk, says the CEO of BlackRock. He went on to issue what can only amount to a stark warning: if you risk saddling your investors with stranded assets, with no demonstration of how you are moving to de-climate risk your operations, there will be consequences.

The writing is on the wall. The Prime Minister knows this. Here are his words from last November:

“This 10-point plan will turn the UK into the world’s number one centre for green technology and finance, creating the foundations for decades of economic growth.”


He went on to describe his 10-point plan as

“a global template for delivering net zero emissions”,

ahead of the UK hosting the COP 26 climate summit in Glasgow this year. Someone should tell the Prime Minister that his Government are attempting to put through a Financial Services Bill, in 2021, which is devoid of the words “green”, “net zero” or “climate”.

I was delighted last December when the Prime Minister announced that the UK will end all support to overseas fossil fuels projects. How could I not be, when it is one of the asks in my Private Member’s Bill, the Petroleum (Amendment) Bill? The Prime Minister should know that then to allow 17 fossil fuel projects to be railroaded through to beat an arbitrary deadline before COP 26 is not really showing that he gets it. For example, there was a headline in the Telegraph on 6 February this year:

“Major Brazilian oil and gas project could get UK backing despite promised end to fossil fuel funding”.


Are we really going to allow UK Export Finance support for the east Africa crude oil pipeline? These investments, using UK taxpayers’ money today to fund what will amount to stranded assets tomorrow, are nothing short of immoral.

As if those examples of the abuse of UK taxpayers’ money on fossil fuel projects abroad were not bad enough, we still have the threat of the go-ahead for the first deep coal mine in the UK for 30 years, in Cumbria. How is that “powering past coal”? These examples alone, if they are allowed to go ahead, show a deplorable lack of fiduciary duty on the part of our Government. These amendments, which refer to climate risk, are sorely needed.

A good number of them are about mandating the FCA and the PRA, and strengthening their structures to ensure that all investment organisations that fall under their jurisdiction have regard to climate-related financial risk and protect Britain’s international reputation by having regard to her international and domestic commitments. I support the intent behind them and look forward to the movers bringing them back on Report, in amalgamated form. There is cross-party support for many of these amendments.

I single out Amendment 48, in the name of my noble friend Lord Oates and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman, Lady Jones of Whitchurch and Lady Altmann, as important. Bringing forward by two years the date by when the recommendations of the final report of the task force on climate-related financial disclosures come into force, to 2023, will send the right signals.

Amendment 17 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, amends Amendment 16 to include the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. I have every sympathy with the intent behind the amendment, especially in light of the recent excellent Dasgupta review, The Economics of Biodiversity, but I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that this is such an important issue that it might be better tabled as a stand-alone amendment.

In conclusion, if one looks at the first page of NASA’s “Vital Signs of the Planet” fact page—and I urge noble Lords to have a look at it—it tells us that we are hurtling towards disaster unless we transition away from burning fossil fuels to power our way of life. Vulnerable communities and developing nations, many of them already exposed to the worst physical impacts of climate change, can least afford the economic shocks of a poorly implemented transition. We must implement the changes we need in a way that delivers the urgent change that these communities need without worsening their dual burden. We have alternatives proven to deliver at scale, so let us use the opportunity presented by the Bill to address the urgent need to unlock private sector finance and give the actors therein the confidence to accelerate the investment needed to deliver net zero by 2050.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register, specifically the directorship of a research company that has published extensively on environmental, social and governance matters. I am also chairman of the Conservative Party’s investment committee. We are currently shortlisting fund managers for our long-term funds, and I reassure noble Lords that ESG rigour will be a key factor in our decision-making.

This is my first outing in Grand Committee, so I crave a little forbearance. I will make a few general points before turning to the specific. First, as regards climate change and full disclosure, the industry is moving in the right direction anyway, and I think that that needs to be acknowledged. For example, I read that the Investment Association, which represents 250 members managing £8.5 trillion, intends to quiz companies at their AGMs on the quality of their climate-related reporting and will relate any of those inadequacies to their members. This is partly a commercial imperative: customer attitudes have shifted materially and will no doubt continue to do so. For example, assets under management at ESG ETFs—that is, exchange traded funds—rose from $54 billion in November 2019 to $174 billion a year later. Those are not large amounts of money in the broad investment sphere, but they show the direction of travel.

Therefore, I was very pleased that this Government have committed to the highest of standards. On 9 November last year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was unequivocal on this. He said that he wants

“an open, attractive and well-regulated market”

which will continue

“to lead the world in pioneering new technologies and shifting finance towards a net zero future.”

I welcome that and, referring back to some of the work that my company has done in areas such as fast fashion and marshalling scarce water resources—and here I echo the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh—I believe that these standards should be applied not just to carbon emissions but across the ESG piece.

I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and his quote from Jes Staley that the industry absolutely should push the climate agenda. However, in order to build the open, attractive and well-regulated market that the Chancellor described, I believe that we need to be very careful with some of the proposed climate change-related amendments at this stage. I have considerable sympathy with the argument of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, about embedding the principles into the Bill, particularly those amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Oates, grouped together in his second group, including Amendment 14. A series of well-meaning amendments at the margin perhaps do not seem individually onerous, but they may end up being counterproductive, and I would like to try to explain why.

The worry we should have is that, if we overcomplicate this at this stage, the rules are more likely to be honoured in the breach than in the observance and/or work to the benefit of other regulatory regimes. I would not like to see the difficult issues we are debating here shifted into other jurisdictions. As always, the main beneficiaries of that would be compliance departments; it would naturally favour larger players and ultimately, as I said earlier, end up being counterproductive, partly by stifling innovation. This is also an important consideration in the context of equivalent discussions with the EU.