Financial Guidance and Claims Act 2018 (Naming and Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2019 — House of Lords, 2019-05-01
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Robert Stevenson (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, in moving the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper, I stress that it is an attempt to bring forward an opportunity for those who are interested in this topic to debate it at length. In the absence of any other opportunities, and given the fact that there is space within our normally busy and packed schedule, I hope this will be welcomed by all Members of the House. I declare my previous interests as a former chair of the StepChange charity and as a member of the Financial Inclusion Commission. However, I have no current interests which would otherwise need to be declared The main purpose of the debate is to draw attention to statutory instrument 2019/383, on financial services consumer protection. It deals with the naming of and consequential amendments to the body set up by the Financial Guidance and Claims Act 2018, which this House spent a considerable amount of time discussing and amending before it was completed As a result of the provisions of and powers in that Act, it was not at all unreasonable for the Government to suggest that the body previously known as the Single Financial Guidance Body should be renamed. Indeed, the naming has been done relatively quickly and seems to have gone down quite well. It is, of course, rather simple: the Money and Pensions Service. It does not try to confuse by any complicated and clever analysis of the work it is doing. One hesitates to quote, "What’s in a name?", but I sometimes wonder whether in the simple name "Money and Pensions Service" lies a deeper worry that we are actually talking about two separate issues. That was a theme in all our debates on the Financial Guidance and Claims Bill. It may be inevitable that how people in this country operate and manage their money is quantitatively and in many other ways different from the way in which they save for and, we hope, live off their pension in the later years of their lives. The functions of the three organisations that were brought together to create one body—I am going to call the Money and Pensions Service "MAPS" in future as it is easier—are different. We should recognise that they are different. They will have different interests and concerns and there will be different pressures brought to bear on the body by those agencies The timescales over which those functions operate are clearly different. Debt or concerns about money are very often short term and operate at different times in people’s lives. Pensions have to be saved for over an extended period and are subject to much more concern about the impact they will have later in life. With people living longer, they need more concern and interest given to them. The impact that both issues have on the economy is different. Indeed, there was some logic in the Government’s original proposal to set up two bodies to look after issues that arise from debt and money more generally, and those that arise from pensions. The final decision was to combine them in one, and we are where we are. I do not think there is much point in going back over these issues. We should acknowledge that we need to give the new body time to settle in and should build in an appropriate review period in which decisions can be looked at. As I say, we are where we are Looking at the body itself, it is early days. It has established itself. It has developed a logo, as one would expect. I have no particular views about that. I noticed that at the official launch, the chief executive—it is hard to get a sense of this from reading the speech—made a slightly tentative poke at whether people thought it captured the spirit of what the body is trying to do. I could not hear echoes of laughter or concern in the room as a result; I am sure it went down well. After all, it is a very clean, rather curly object which I am happy to wave around. At least we have it: the body is established. It has its format, it has a board of significant people with real contributions to make in this area. It has a very distinguished chair, Sir Hector Sants, who not only comes from the debt charity StepChange—indeed, he was my successor there—but is also the former chief executive of the FSA. We are talking about a substantial body, at a time when it needs to draw together the issues that have been given to it by Parliament. It now has its senior staff in place, and they look to me to have considerable skills and expertise. I am sure they will do very well. A real commitment comes through in all the documents I have seen—they are largely two speeches, but there are some other papers—to consult about the future, to build on possibilities for the business plan, to engage with as many people as possible and to take advantage of the new body going forward. That has to be a good thing, and I welcome it and look forward to it Having said that, there would be little point in having this debate if we did not raise some issues for the Minister to respond to, so I advised her beforehand that I might ask a couple of somewhat difficult questions and raise issues that she might want to reflect on over time. I am going to focus mainly on the debt side of the new body—I think others will come in on the pension side. I hope that together we will get some sense of the overall issues We have to recognise that considerable problems in the economy are still arising from unmanageable debt. Recent figures from the StepChange yearbook, which has just been published, show that the total number of people in contact with the charity has increased significantly over the last 10 years—from 577,000 to 657,000. That is significant given the capacity of the body to deal with that number. We are talking about why people get themselves into unmanageable debt. It is mainly down to reduced income arising from unemployment, redundancy or injury. Therefore, there is no change there, and the individual contributions are very interesting.