Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, who really cut to the nub of this issue and the reason for this Bill. This is a case of extreme, long-term injustice in which people suffer through absolutely no fault of their own. The fault lies with the failure of the financial sector, the regulators and the Government to take action. The speech from the noble Earl, Earl Lytton, was particularly powerful in illustrating the way in which failures in the financial sector interact with gross failures of regulation in the building sector. Some people are almost literally being crunched in the middle between those two situations. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, on bringing this Bill before us and being a dedicated, long-term campaigner on behalf of mortgage prisoners; he gave us a clear explanation of the issue, which I will not repeat. I acknowledge that I have acted as a modest supporter of the noble Lord since the passages of the Financial Services Act 2021 and the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023. In that modest supporting role, I went with him to the Treasury with some of the victims affected—the mortgage prisoners themselves. I have to note that, as we heard from the noble Lord, at that meeting, we heard the testimony of just how much this has destroyed some people’s lives; indeed, we have seen some tragic cases of suicide. However, I am afraid that what also came through from that meeting was the sense that the Treasury really did not grasp the issue. That makes a powerful case for the Bill before us today and for a public inquiry in order to get the full understanding. We have the excellent LSE/Martin Lewis report but relying on academics or on someone who is, after all, just an ordinary member of the public to explain things is really not the right place to be in this great systems failure case. The timing of this debate is interesting. We are talking about an extreme case of abuse of consumers in the all-too-often predatory financial sector. We are seeing scandals strike again and again, and innocent consumers are the victims. It is concerning that, just yesterday, we saw the unexpected resignation of the head of the UK Financial Ombudsman Service amid what has been described as a “major review of the consumer redress system in the financial services sector”. The Financial Times reports that she was “under pressure to take a less consumer-friendly approach”. We are told that industry executives complained that she was too much on the side of consumers. The head of the consumer group Fairer Finance is quoted in the Financial Times as saying: “It may well be that she is quitting in protest at the direction of travel … perhaps the strongest signal yet that the Treasury is serious about watering down consumer protections”. The context of the Bill provides a real opportunity for the Minister and the Government to signal that that is indeed not the case. Accepting the Bill would be one way of sending that signal. We are, of course, in “the fraud capital of the world”. as the head of UK Finance said. Surely, the Government should be more concerned about the fate of consumers, given what we have heard today. I have one final thought. An article in the Express newspaper on 22 January cited the FCA’s figure of 47,000 mortgage prisoners. The story reported that: “The Economic Secretary to the Treasury has promised to look into these latest proposals”, those proposals being those of the LSE and Martin Lewis. The signal here to mortgage prisoners from at least one media source is that are going to see progress; they will see genuine reaction from the Government. I can only offer my hope that we will hear something positive today for all the people who read that story and had, after so many years of suffering, a little dash of hope.