Lord Blackwell (Con)

My Lords, I am more sympathetic to the approach that the Government are taking here. I think that we need to be careful what we ask for when we interpret parliamentary oversight as potentially meaning Parliament being involved in the drafting and redrafting of every detailed regulation. Not only is that time-consuming and likely to lead to long delays, but I fear that the political process will inevitably mean that it is weighted to the highest level of consumer protection regardless of the costs or the side consequences. There are other ways of having parliamentary oversight of the regulator. The Government can appoint the chairman, the chief executive and the board members. It does not have to be ex ante writing and approval of all the rules in primary legislation or committee. Parliament can excise oversight by holding the FCA ex post to account on whether it is fulfilling its remit in a sensible and proportionate manner. We have chosen this system of having regulators. We should allow those regulators to operate properly and then hold them to account. When Members refer to the long list of protocols that consumers are led through in order to buy products, a lot of that is belt-and-braces protection that the financial institutions have been forced to put in place because of the complexity of the regulation and the risks of action against them if they do not ensure that the consumer has satisfied every detail of the consumer protection. The role of the regulators here is to exercise proportionate regulation. I think that we should hold them to account ex post rather than trying to insert Parliament in the process ex ante.