Financial Services and Markets Bill [Lords]

Neil Duncan-Jordan Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Neil Duncan-Jordan (Poole) (Lab)]

I have spoken before about the issue of hidden credit liabilities and the role of the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Bill touches on some of the concerns I have raised.

My constituents James and Becky Glanville built a successful family-run nursing home business, but it was destroyed by undisclosed risks embedded in complex financial products sold by NatWest, part of RBS. They were never told that interest rate swaps carried significant liabilities that would be treated as secured debt, erode their borrowing capacity and trigger covenant breaches as interest rates fell.

Despite clear regulatory requirements for transparency and informed consent, those risks were never disclosed. The regulatory framework then let my constituents down, too. The FSA and FCA’s redress scheme excluded the hidden credit lines from its review, denying fair compensation to victims like the Glanvilles. The regulator effectively colluded with the banks to suppress this fraud and reduce compensation costs, and by 2019 the Glanvilles were owed £6.3 million, but to date they have received absolutely nothing.

The Glanvilles’ case is not isolated. It reflects a wider systemic failure and underscores the urgent need for a full independent investigation and a fair, comprehensive redress scheme. I would be interested to hear the Economic Secretary’s views on the issue and whether the Bill would have protected the Glanvilles had it been in place at the time.

After a decade and a half of austerity, an estimated 4.4 million people have taken out £13 billion-worth of credit to pay for essentials. According to the Centre for Responsible Credit, over a million households have potentially been lent to irresponsibly in the last two and a half years. We know that when the rules are vague, it is borrowers who ultimately pay the price. When the cost of living crisis has already pushed household budgets to breaking point, the Government must not undermine the vital safety net that underpins consumer trust in the entire financial system.

The FOS is a vital safety net for consumers when something goes wrong, but clause 7 introduces a vastly more complex system for how the FOS determines complaints. The shift from a level playing field with an impartial fairness test to one that initially presumes the firm was in the right means that consumers could now face a harder uphill battle to receive redress and could even be denied the redress they would have received under the old test.

The Bill’s stated aim is to introduce deregulation to stimulate growth, but there are serious questions to be asked. Who determines the rights of consumers? Who determines the obligations of firms? Who determines the balance between commercial freedom and public protection, and ultimately, who answers when that balance proves inadequate?

We know that the more authority Parliament delegates to the FCA, the more essential it becomes to preserve democratic accountability. That matters when the rights of ordinary citizens are at stake, and particularly when there is good reason to question the FCA’s judgment and priorities. We cannot simply place all the responsibility on to borrowers. I hope that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury will be able to provide some much-needed reassurance on these genuine concerns.