Financial Conduct Authority — House of Commons, 2016-02-01
Topic: Domestic Commerce
James Roger Cartlidge (Conservative, Centre-right): I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb). He is a doughty fighter for financial justice not only for his constituents, but for all our constituents, and we owe him a great debt Like my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), I wish to declare an interest in that I am the director of a small business regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Like him, I was also regulated by the Financial Services Authority, but unlike him, I do not go back as far as IMRO. I will come on to some of his points. Whereas most Members have focused on constituents’ cases, he, uniquely, has pushed the debate wider—to the overall role of the FCA. If I have the time, I will come on to that I, too, want to mention my constituents’ cases. The first case is that of Terence and Jean Gray of Holbrook in South Suffolk. They lost the £50,000 they invested in Connaught income fund series 3 plus the interest, as well as the interest on a further £50,000 in Connaught income fund series 1. Mr and Mrs Gray, who are now in their 70s, saved that money throughout their lives and planned to live off it following their retirement, but they fear they will never see the money again. Their primary concern is that the FCA is unable to provide a timeframe for when its investigations will be concluded. Several hon. Members have made that point, and I hope that the Minister, who I presume will speak soon, can give us an update on the timescale they face I have received correspondence not just from consumers, but from firms. In particular, I have heard from Steven Farrall of Chattisham in my constituency, who owns the Ipswich-based firm Williams Farrall Woodward, a financial planning and portfolio management business. His concern is about the retail distribution review and the new way in which we regulate commission and fee-charging on investments, although I do not want to go into the detail of it. He encapsulates the anger felt by many smaller businesses about the regulator. He specifically blames those rules for the loss of about 13,500 independent financial advisers. He says: "My own opinion of the RDR is that at heart it is an assault on the property and employment rights of thousands of law abiding tax paying private citizens, effectively the employers of the FCA bureaucrats… It is an absolute disgrace in a free democratic society the bunch of self regarding and utterly unaccountable functionaries should have such power." That is perhaps a tad harsh, but it brings me to my own experience I started a mortgage brokerage in 2004. Of course, that did not come under the FCA, but my experience was that the FSA was always box-ticking, rather than looking at potential problems and doing something about them. I could give many examples of that. Every six months, we had to submit something called a capital adequacy return, despite being a relatively small business. We had a famous document called MCOB—the mortgage conduct of business rules—which was the size of a doorstep, and none of which made sense to anybody. I think it is the assumption of the regulator that small practitioners have armies of compliance officers, just like the banks. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The most extreme example of the FSA being focused on bureaucracy, rather than dealing with the problems in the industry, came in 2010 at the height of the euro crisis, when many people doubted from day to day whether it would survive. On a day when the euro’s survival was the top item on the news, I received an email for the directors of regulated firms. I opened it, expecting advice about the possible calamity we faced, only to find that it was a diversity survey. It was an extraordinary diversity survey that wanted to know, across all levels of management in my business, which was a very small business employing a handful of people, not only what percentage of staff were from each ethnicity, but what percentage were transsexual and even intersexual—a word I had never even heard before. The regulator, on that day of financial crisis, wanted to know how many of my staff were intersexual. A bit like the word poppers, I suspect that word will be new to many people—possibly even to people who are in the Chamber today I use that example to illustrate how the FSA was a tick-box regulator. That is why, despite all its work, it never noticed the basic thing, which was that our financial system was heading for an almighty crash and crisis. What we can say in favour of the FCA is that we have not had a credit crunch under it. We have had the successes that my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) talked about. There is one in particular that I will finish on What the FCA has done on mortgage rules and on the property market has been for the good. We need prudential borrowing. I am a conservative on financial services and think that we were far too reckless in the build-up to the crunch. If we want fairness, we must recognise that asking first-time buyers to be so heavily regulated, while a buy-to-let applicant for a mortgage faces no regulation and can take out an interest-only mortgage for a huge amount of money, without a key facts illustration that has to be advised, regulated and so on, is deeply unfair In conclusion, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset that it is too early to pass judgment on the substantive work of the FCA, but we all feel that it needs to do greater work on the basic injustices that our constituents face in cases such as Connaught. I hope that the Minister will have some news on when people who have been affected by such cases can expect to hear substantive news about their rights.