Compensation (London Capital & Finance plc and Fraud Compensation Fund) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-22
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Peter Grant (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): The SNP will, as we indicated, support the Bill on Third Reading. I thank everyone who contributed to the debate today. There were a number of interesting contributions on my amendment. I understand why some people did not feel they could support it in its entirety, but I was very clear that across the House the intention behind the amendment has a considerable amount of support. I hope the Government will take that on board The second point that became clear during the debate is that the regulatory failures that allowed London Capital & Finance to happen were not restricted to the FCA. There were catastrophic failures in that organisation—that is now undeniable—but they were not the only failures. It was not only the FCA that let down investors in some of the other scam companies mentioned during consideration of the Bill. Companies House did not enforce the requirements to publish company information. It says it is not its job to verify that companies submit the names of directors, for example. If that is not the responsibility of Companies House, whose responsibility is it Nobody enforces the rules that require companies to publish their annual accounts and other critical information on time. Companies and directors can have literally dozens of yellow card suspensions against a company, but then they are lifted and nothing ever happens to them. Those requirements are essential if people with an interest in a company are to get an early warning that things are going wrong. If those requirements are not observed, companies can be sunk before anybody has a chance to do anything about it I appreciate that part of that issue is not within the remit of the Treasury, but I hope that what comes out of these proceedings is that colleagues on the Treasury Committee and the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee will have plenty of new material to work on. Clearly, this is a failing of such proportions and complexity it will take more than one piece of legislation to put it right. Ultimately, we are the regulators. Every time we say there has been a failure of regulation, what we are saying is that we, in this Parliament, have failed to protect our constituents properly, so there needs to be a degree of humility among all of us at the degree to which this Parliament and its machinery failed to predict, identify, prevent and remedy the scams that we have, sadly, spent so much time talking about over the past few months In supporting the Bill, I share the comments made towards the Treasury team. I have been very grateful for the positive way in which many of my comments have been taken by Ministers, which does not always happen with comments from Opposition Members. A big shout out to Salma and Scott in the SNP research team, who once again made me sound as if I knew what I was talking about, which is quite an achievement. A big thank you, also, to all those who gave evidence, either written or oral. Some were talking about things that had hurt them greatly. It was difficult for them to talk about that on the record. I hope the Bill has been made a bit better as a result of their contributions and I hope their contributions will have made sure that the issues raised, if they have not been dealt with in the Bill, will be dealt with by other legislation very soon.