Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)

I thank the noble Baronesses for their questions and remarks on what are really technical issues. There is no real policy change, but the issues are none the less important. As the noble Baronesses said, one of the key issues is that we want to ensure that the economy grows. As far as our financial regulation infrastructure is concerned, it is always welcome to have heard from the IMF that the architecture that we have now is some of the best of its kind in the world. The IMF also endorsed the Government’s fiscal plans as striking “a good balance between supporting growth and safeguarding fiscal sustainability”. In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, the Government are committed to upholding financial stability, which is a prerequisite of our position as a leading global financial centre. This is about rebalancing our approach to risk and pushing back on some of the mission creep that we have seen over the past decade. There is scope to do this while continuing to protect financial stability, and obviously we will always keep this under review, which was one of the noble Baroness’s questions. The noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, asked about parliamentary scrutiny and how Parliament will continue to scrutinise what the FCA and the PRA are going to do. They are independent non-governmental organisations and their independence is vital to their role. However, they are fully accountable to the Government and Parliament for how they exercise their functions, and this accountability is critical to ensure that they are advancing the objectives given to them by Parliament and performing at the optimum. There were other questions about whether we are giving regulators too much power. We do not believe we are. We have a flexible system. Some of it is still going to be in legislation; some of it is going to be in regulation. The flexibility is there to ensure that the one thing that we create is growth in the economy. To the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, I say it helps to deliver growth because growth is our ultimate ambition. To achieve this, the Government have announced the most extensive package of financial service reforms in over a decade. Reform will unlock growth by increasing the global competitiveness of the sector, reducing unnecessary regulatory burden, spurring the sector’s confidence and boosting innovation and opportunities, which is one of the issues that the noble Baroness raised. Obviously, it is about flexibility, and we need to ensure that we remain flexible in our approach to these regulations and continue to keep them under review. We believe that these technical statutory instruments do that. It will be for the FCA and the PRA to decide how to streamline and improve their rulebooks. The FCA has already published a discussion paper seeking views on organisational and conduct rules that could be removed or simplified. It has also announced work to review who can be treated as a professional investor, another key plank of the current framework. I hope this answers many of the questions that were asked. If there are any that I have left out, I am sure that we can write to noble Lords.