Callum Anderson

It is a pleasure to contribute to this debate and to follow the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann). Members on all three Front Benches have rightly set out the importance of financial services to the UK economy. It is indeed one of the UK’s most international sectors, and one that holds great significance for the prospects of UK industry, businesses and households across the United Kingdom, including in my constituency. I am very pleased to support the Bill this evening, as it retains the UK’s hybrid combination of strong institutions, high-quality regulators and, ultimately, clear rules that are critical not only to maintaining investor confidence—a currency more valuable than ever before in an incredibly volatile world—to put their money here, but to people and businesses across the UK who use financial services in their everyday lives. Given the limited time I have, I will restrict my comments to a few areas. First, I will mention credit unions and clause 2. My hon. Friends the Members for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) and for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes), whom I congratulate on his appointment as co-operative and mutuals champion—a very wise choice by the Chancellor and the Economic Secretary—have made incredibly powerful points on credit unions. They are absolutely right to say that the current common bond rules date from another era, when society organised itself very differently. I am pleased that the Bill fixes those matters by ensuring that relatives can join in if they live in different households, that retirees can stay in and join after they stop work, and that students can qualify under the new locality bond. I also welcome raising the membership cap from 3 million to 10 million, as it enables credit unions across the UK to once again have a fair go at expanding and scaling. I want to make a few comments about the regulators. Clauses 15 to 25 reshape how the FCA and the PRA do their jobs, and I welcome the broad direction of travel that the Government have set. Clause 16 makes regulators more considerately and thoughtfully weigh the experience of small and medium-sized firms by having greater regard for proportionality, which is important both in terms of the size of firms that are required to comply with rules and regulations and the cost and benefit of any rule that is made. Having worked supporting smaller quoted companies and then large institutions at the London Stock Exchange Group before I entered this place, it is to me pretty much intuitive common sense that a small firm cannot staff a compliance department or answer every consultation that is issued by Government or a regulator with the same vigour as larger counterparts. It is therefore incumbent on all our regulators—in this case the FCA and PRA, but I would similarly make the comment with regard to regulators operating across our economy—to properly and proactively account for this if they want to be a genuinely constructive partner in supporting economic growth and cultivating meaningfully competitive domestic markets. I also understand that the Government will retain the Lords amendment to keep proportionality as an explicit test in the day-to-day work of both regulators. If that is the case, I very much welcome that. Under clause 19, the FCA and the PRA will be required to report at least once a year on how they are advancing the competitiveness and growth secondary objectives. These reports will feed in the Treasury’s twice-yearly performance reviews with the regulators’ respective chief executives. I think that is a highly appropriate measure, given that almost all the financial institutions—be they large or small, market infrastructure, bank or insurer—were incredibly keen for the previous Government to ensure that regulators adopted such an objective. Given that it has probably been four or five years now since that obligation was placed on our regulators, it is right that those regulators who have such a large impact on our economy explain their record to Parliament, in particular the Commons Treasury Committee and the Lords Economic Affairs Committee. In the three minutes or so that I have remaining, I want to close on the Bill’s most forward-facing clauses: those relating to cryptoassets and digital assets more broadly. FCA analysis has found that as many as 7 million Britons own or have owned cryptoassets, and just a few more—9.3 million—hold a stocks and shares ISA. I will spare the Economic Secretary one of my sermons on the virtues of retail investing, but I just mention that statistic because it demonstrates how the consumer landscape is quickly shifting and, with it, the risk that consumers are increasingly exposed to. It has never been more important for the UK— Government and regulators—to ensure that we are keeping up with developments in cryptoassets and delivering appropriate consumer protections, as my hon. Friend the Chair of the Treasury Committee explained earlier. But we must also do that without restraining the inevitable opportunities that digitising our financial markets offers us and risking letting Britain fall behind. On digital assets themselves, the Government are making welcome strides forward, particularly in supporting Chris Woolard’s first report as the UK’s wholesale digital markets champion. The main challenge facing the UK is how we maintain momentum in the years ahead, given that other jurisdictions such as the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore are pursuing these agendas with great pace. I hope that the Government will use their regular engagement with the Bank of England to ensure that it moves with as much vigour on stablecoins as the Government are on digital gilt. With the geopolitical volatility that I mentioned earlier, Britain can offer something quite rare: a consistent, predictable environment for innovation in stablecoin and across asset classes, be they fixed income or equities. Turning to clause 50, while the digital assets strategy, which has been proposed by the Opposition, is an interesting addition to the Bill, I am not instinctively sure whether legally mandating the Government to produce a strategy is necessarily appropriate. But I am sure that the Minister will explain the Government’s position in her wind-up speech. I am very pleased to support this Bill. A competitive financial services sector provides so much more value than just itself and is a massive asset to all the companies and people in our constituencies.