Financial Exclusion (Liaison Committee Report)

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, on securing this important and, as she reminded us, timely debate. I am pleased to have this opportunity, despite the amount of time that has passed since the original committee issued its first report, to thank her for her continuing leadership on this issue, both as chair of the original ad hoc Select Committee—on which I was privileged to serve, with my noble friend Lord Holmes and others, when a new Member of your Lordships’ House—and in persuading the Liaison Committee that the issue we are considering today merited a follow-up inquiry and report.

The challenge of tackling financial exclusion is surely worthy not just of the work on which the noble Baroness has so ably led but of ongoing attention by the Government, the Financial Conduct Authority and the wider financial sector. For if there is one clear message that emerges from this report, and from what I am sorry to describe as a rather underwhelming response from the Government, it is that there is still a lot more to be done in this space, as my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond has already said.

As other noble Lords have also said, it is important to consider the current context of today’s debate. That context is rapidly worsening as the poorest in society, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria said, in particular face massive cost of living pressures, which does not seem to be reflected in the Government’s response. I ask myself how best to describe the Government’s response. “Detached”, “sedate” and “academic” are words that come to mind, as do the terms “divorced from the wider context”, “no sense of urgency”, as the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, mentioned, and “a missed opportunity”.

As a committee, we were mindful of our chair’s helpful advice that our original recommendations should be measured and realistic. The recommendations in the follow-up report, which include reiterations of our original recommendations and some new recommendations, are consistent with that advice. Of course, the original and subsequent recommendations were made before rising inflation, interest rates, food prices and utility bills combined to such toxic effect, compounding the difficulties already faced by those who are financially excluded. Like others, I would have thought that that would make the recommendations even more pertinent; however, the Government’s response has disabused me of such logic.

At a time when Gus Alexiou, a journalist at Forbes who draws on his own lived experience of disability, writes of some disabled people worrying about not just how they will put food on the table but how they can afford to power the vital medical equipment necessary to keep them safe at home, the Government’s equivocal response to the report seems surprisingly counterintuitive. Mr Alexiou explains that the medical equipment includes ventilators, nebulisers, oxygen concentrators, feeding pumps, SAT machines, seizure alert mats, kidney dialysis machines and rising beds. According to the UK-based pan-disability Scope, there are currently 900,000 people with disabilities living in fuel poverty, which could rise to about 2.1 million in October if typical annual domestic bills reach their predicted figure of £3,000. I speak with some personal experience of the medical equipment he mentioned because I have had to use nebulisers and have relied on oxygen concentrators and I still bear the scars, literally, of having a PEG—a feeding pump—to keep me supplied with essential nutrients when I was unable to swallow for five months following neurosurgery some years ago. I have been there—I have worn the T-shirt, as it were—and that was without having to worry about any financial considerations because I was in hospital at the time and I was not financially excluded. Mr Alexiou concludes:

“What is far less difficult and actually, all too easy, is to get away with side-lining the suffering of millions of disabled people because you can be confident that everyone else just has too much on their plate and is busy looking the other way.”


Hard-hitting stuff maybe, but I suspect that it will resonate with a lot of disabled people, a lot of whom identify as financially excluded. I am not saying that this is deliberate, but I am saying that, ultimately, a key factor in the Government’s failure to seize the opportunity that responding to this report presents stems, I believe, from a lack of lived experience of financial exclusion and of disability at senior levels of the Government, the Treasury and the DWP. Otherwise—to pick just three examples of recommendations in the report that have already been touched on and that the Government have rejected—the Government would understand the importance of formally reviewing the powers available to the FCA to mitigate the negative effects of bank branch and free ATM closures; of expanding the remit of the FCA to include a statutory duty to promote financial inclusion as one of its key objectives; and of introducing a requirement for the FCA to make rules setting out a reasonable duty of care for financial services providers to exercise towards their customers. This would, of course, as has already been explained, be very different from the new consumer duty proposed by the FCA.

I think that the Government can do better than this. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to show in his remarks that the Treasury, in particular, is willing to revisit the committee’s modest, measured proposals in the light of a rapidly deteriorating economic situation both globally and here in the UK. In my view, the Prime Minister has given fantastic leadership on Ukraine. That now needs to be replicated here at home with the cost of living measures to be announced imminently. I really hope that they will include measures to tackle financial exclusion, as outlined in these recommendations.

This report reflects well on your Lordships’ House. It is carefully considered and is testimony to the added value that your Lordships’ House brings to political debate. I close by once again thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, for her leadership. I am sure that this is far from the final word that she and others will have on this issue.