Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-09-06
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Robert Stevenson (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I will also speak to Amendments 34, 36 and 37. I am afraid this is quite a wide-ranging group, so I may have to put a little time into each of the amendments. We are pointing in slightly different directions here, but there is a common theme, so it is useful to have them together in one group We start with our old, standard question about what is advice and what is guidance. The Government are beginning to get themselves into rather bad habits here, if I might be so rude as to suggest that more thinking needs to be done. I am not sure whether other Members of the Committee will also have had the background note to all Peers on defining advice and guidance that I got at 3.46 pm this afternoon. I have not had time to look at it. It was circulated from the Government Whips’ Office. It is quite helpful, and I have been reading it in the interstices of the debate today but, obviously not wishing to miss a word from either of the Ministers or from others participating, I have not been able to focus on it entirely. However, although I look forward to what the Minister may say in response, if I judge it correctly it repeats, in essence, the wording that she used at Second Reading and in earlier stages of Committee on the difference between advice and guidance. I accept that that is probably as far as we are going to get on this, as it is a three-page document and has quite a lot of detail in it, but I am sure that others present—I am not looking at anyone in particular—might wish to come in on this point later, or indeed on later amendments I mention this because Amendment 33 is again probing the definitions of advice and guidance. There is not much point in going into this in any detail other than to say that we now have more information, which may allow us to get a little further down the line on this. If I am right, the advice now being given is that there are quasi-statutory and statutory definitions which will take us down the road of defining financial advice as an activity that involves a personal recommendation to an individual about a particular course of action, rather than the provision of information about a range of options that may be available to them; and that guidance is generally understood to be any service to support clients making investments that is not advice. That presumably needs to be interpreted for the wider range, with an additional comment on what the definition of debt advice is, which is different to the guidance functions delivered and involves activity specifically regulated by the FCA. I will use those as the basis for the further remarks I will make tonight Amendment 34 would ensure that if a member of the public comes to the new body seeking advice from two or more different functions of the body, they will be able to access it if needed, as opposed to only one function. The intention here is that catching someone as they come into the system means that they stay in the system until the advice or guidance that they want is resolved. I think we all agree that that is important, but it is more obvious in the breach than in the observance. The technology has not always been as good at picking up as we might wish The word that is often used in these circumstances is "hot-keying"; in other words, once you have someone on the phone or through a computer system who is engaging with you in the process of trying to resolve their problem regarding any one of the issues that have been dealt with by the SFGB, you do not lose them until you are at least in progress or on a programme—that is, you are informing them or if possible, if it requires more than that, making sure that they stick with it until such time as it is resolved. The amendment is meant to strengthen the arrangements to ensure that we get to the point where we have a seamless approach, however many bodies are involved and however many different operations are required to provide the information, advice and guidance sought.