Financial Services Bill

Lord Sikka Excerpts

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

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as stated in the register. I support both Amendments 10 and 26 in the name of my noble friend Lady Noakes. They do not mean that Parliament would be seeking to usurp the role of the regulators, or to attempt to rewrite MiFID II which, according to Forbes Magazine, has required 30,000 pages to explain its regulations.

It is right that the Bill enables our regulators to act quickly and flexibly to respond to changes in the markets or the introduction of new financial products. However, without the scrutiny formerly carried out by the European Parliament of each and every detail of regulations and directives, it is necessary that Parliament should have oversight of the regulators’ work. My noble friend is right that we need to agree the optimum balance and how this will be done before the powers conferred upon the PRA and FCA are made available for them to use.

Amendments 18 and 19 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted, are motivated by a desire to continue to align to EU regulation, even though there are no expectations that the EU will make any further significant equivalence declarations in the short term. Amendment 19 places a large, poorly defined burden on the FCA to show where and how its draft rules have been influenced. It is clear that the FCA will consider many external factors in drafting its rules. As your Lordships know, it is intended to agree a basis on which both regulators will be made accountable to your Lordships’ House and another place for the way in which they carry out their work. Accordingly, I think it would be too restrictive on the FCA if this amendment were supported. It would also create uncertainty over the Bank of England’s ability to act quickly as necessary in exercising its macroprudential responsibilities.

Similarly, Amendment 20 seeks to allow committees of your Lordships’ House and another place to publish a report on proposed Part 9C rules. It is not clear which committees these will be in the future. It would slow down changes that the FCA will want to make quickly, which could be damaging to the standing and competitiveness of the City. Perhaps my noble friend can tell the House how the Government intend to amend the Bill in order to provide for the necessary scrutiny of acts of the regulators. I am not sure that that would be the effect of Amendment 22, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey. The Government’s intention, which I support, is that we should move away from the cumbersome, codified nature of rules. I would expect the PRA to try to make rules that are shorter and clearer than the regulations they replace. It would not always be appropriate for them to include the full text of the general rules to be replaced.

Amendment 27, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, seems to place a very heavy demand on Parliament to become closely involved in what our regulators do at international conferences, in a way that might be too restrictive on their freedom to participate fully at those conferences. This would be likely to weaken British influence on the outcomes of discussions and decisions made at such conferences.

In Amendment 38, the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, seeks to duplicate other arrangements which will be made to institute the necessary parliamentary accountability and again appears motivated by a desire to continue to align to EU rules. If the Government can bring forward an amendment to increase the attention that the PRA is required to give to the competitiveness of the markets, as strongly proposed by several noble Lords on Monday, I would suggest that Amendment 38 might be unnecessary.

While considering this matter, can the Minister confirm that it remains the Treasury’s intention to advise the Bank of England not to adopt a similar measure to the EBA to permit banks to capitalise software investments for the purpose of stress testing? This is one example of where, instead of equivalence, we will have higher standards than the EU, although regulatory standards are often not two-dimensional, high or low.

The effect of Amendment 39 is surely to transfer back to Parliament the detailed rule-making powers. Quite apart from the fact that neither your Lordships’ House nor another place is equipped to carry out such detailed, line-by-line scrutiny, the amendment would seriously slow down rule-changing, removing agility and flexibility from the regulators.

Amendment 40 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, does not remove the ultimate power to change rules from the regulator but introduces a cumbersome process involving the issuance of reports by committees of both Houses. Does the noble Lord intend these committees to be new standing committees, and how will they be resourced? I also note that in the case of a draft being laid, say, a week before Parliament rises in July, it might be three months before 20 sitting days of either House have elapsed.

I do not understand the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, in introducing Amendment 71—a requirement separately for the Treasury Committee in another place to assess the FCA’s conduct prior to the appointment of a new chief executive.

My noble friend Lord Blackwell’s Amendment 85 makes an interesting proposal as to how the regulators should be made accountable to Parliament. Does my noble friend Lord Howe think that, as far as your Lordships’ House is concerned, scrutiny would come from an existing or soon to be established Select Committee, such as the strangely named Industry and Regulators Committee, or whether a new standing committee should be set up to exercise these functions?

The noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, in his Amendment 137 seeks to place a statutory duty to consult the devolved Administrations over a reserved matter. We await with bated breath the publication of the Dunlop review, which should inform us of how the Government intend to manage relations with the devolved Administrations in the future, including on reserved matters. However, I cannot support the noble Lord’s amendment, which is unnecessary and provocative to certain elements within the devolved authorities.

I look forward to other noble Lords’ contributions and the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Sikka (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 71, which is in my name and supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans.

The amendment seeks to strengthen the effectiveness of financial regulation and calls for scrutiny of the FCA’s conduct by the Treasury Committee prior to the appointment or reappointment of its chief executive. It effectively calls on the committee to act as a guide dog to the watchdog. We all know that effective regulation is a necessary condition for protecting people from malpractices, holding miscreants to account and promoting confidence in the finance industry.

The FCA has failed to deliver robust and effective enforcement and it needs to be helped. Its failures are documented everywhere. The recent report by Dame Elizabeth Gloster on the collapse of London Capital & Finance noted that the FCA did not discharge its functions in respect of LCF in a manner that enabled it to effectively fulfil its statutory objectives and that there were significant gaps and weaknesses in its practices. From my perspective, even more damning was the revelation that FCA staff were not even trained to read financial information to recognise unusual or suspicious transactions.

Another report on the scandal-ridden Connaught Income Fund concluded that the FCA’s regulation of the entities and individuals was not appropriate or effective. We are still awaiting the report on the Woodford Equity Income Fund, when thousands of investors are trapped. Regrettably that is not an independent investigation, but we await the outcome with considerable interest.

The FCA failed to act in the case of Carillion, a company that collapsed in January 2018. Carillion inflated its balance sheet and profits through aggressive accounting practices. These included the use of mark-to-market accounting, enabling the company to leave at least £1.1 billion-worth of worthless contracts on its balance sheet. It failed to amortise £1.57 billion of good will, which was effectively worthless. The company was disseminating that misleading information to the markets but the FCA took no action whatever. Curiously, on 18 September 2020, nearly 21 months after Carillion’s collapse, the FCA issued a warning notice saying that the company and some of its directors had recklessly misled markets and investors over the deteriorating state of its finances before the company collapsed. Where was the FCA for all the earlier years while Carillion was publishing that misleading information? It was nowhere to be seen.

There is now considerable public evidence that the banks have been forging customers’ signatures to alter key documents and repossess customers’ businesses and homes, and that evidence has been published in the mainstream media. I understand that there are over 500 documented cases and the FCA has not even started any investigation. A senior Metropolitan Police fraud officer wrote to the Treasury Select Committee in 2017, stating that the executive boards of some of the most prominent banks were “serious organised crime syndicates”, yet that has not resulted in any action by the FCA.

The bank RBS has systematically defrauded its customers but the FCA has been dragging its feet, often pushed by parliamentary committees and others to do its job. In November 2013 a 20-page report prepared by Lawrence Tomlinson summarised this abuse of bank customers and small businesses at RBS’s global restructuring group, or GRG. The Tomlinson report stated that rather than nurturing small businesses, the bank actually pulled the financial rug and sent them to premature bankruptcy. GRG operated from 2005 to 2013, and at its peak handled 16,000 companies with total assets of around £65 billion. A proportion of those companies were not viable but a great number were and had never defaulted on loans. The FCA’s approach was to bury its own Section 166 report on the RBS frauds. In February 2018, the Treasury Committee ignored the FCA’s reluctance and published the report. The committee said:

“The treatment of vast numbers of SME customers placed in RBS’s Global Restructuring Group was nothing short of scandalous.”


In June 2019 the FCA published what it described as its final report on the investigation into RBS’s treatment of small and medium-sized businesses. The co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Business Banking and Finance said:

“This report is another complete whitewash and another demonstrable failure of the regulator to perform its role.”


The timidity of the FCA is also evident from the long-running HBOS frauds, which show no sign of resolution. In 2013, a report codenamed “Project Lord Turnbull” was published by Sally Masterton, Lloyds senior manager in credit risk oversight in the regulation and governance section of its risk division. It was prepared in response to inquiries made during Thames Valley Police’s investigation into the frauds at the Reading branch of HBOS, and also covered the period before the 2007-08 banking crash and bailouts and the subsequent takeover of HBOS by Lloyds Banking Group. The report noted that HBOS executives had “concealed” asset-stripping frauds at its Reading branch ahead of the bank’s takeover by Lloyds in 2008. The FCA did nothing to bring fraudsters to book.