Draft Insider Dealing (Securities and Regulated Markets) Order 2023

Tulip Siddiq Excerpts

Tuesday 9th May 2023 General Committees

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Latham. Labour fully supports the draft statutory instrument; we will always welcome any tightening of the rules on insider dealing. However, I have a few questions for the Minister, as he would expect.

First, I understand that the order is the outcome of the 2015 fair and effective markets review. Will the Minister explain why it has taken eight years to deliver the order and modernise our rules on insider dealing? As he knows, the EU has been years ahead of us in criminalising most forms of serious market abuse. Why did we have the delay? What assessment has the Treasury made of how much that serious eight-year delay has cost the public?

Will the Minister tell me about the scale of insider trading that preceded the order? How many instances of abuse were treated simply as civil offences? How many instances would have been treated as criminal offences if the draft order had been made earlier, as should have happened eight years ago? The Opposition support the draft order, but I hope that the Minister will be able to answer some of the questions about the long delay.