My Lords, for the purposes of today’s debates I again remind Grand Committee of my financial services interests as in the register.
I have signed Amendments 103 and 104 and agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, so I will not repeat what has already been said. It is a subject that the noble Baroness pursues with diligence, and it is right to do so, even if at times—at least as far as I am concerned—the scope and content of impact assessments are a little disappointing. The amendment relates to the final impact assessments as rules are coming into effect, although, of course, to be useful, impact assessments are needed at each stage. Indeed, if proportionality is to be properly taken into account, that is surely a prerequisite for the regulator.
But returning again to the FiSMA theme, where much of the proportionality, flexibility—call it what you will—will be done on an institution-by-institution basis, so the rules will enable that but not demonstrate how it is to be carried out, I am not sure how that will be properly assessed in an impact assessment based only on the rules. Therefore, it will also be important to be able to capture what actually happens after the rules have come into operation. That might be by way of a retrospective impact assessment after a period of time, and would seem to be another matter that Parliament will need to investigate.
Included in that, it should be relevant to capture the effects of frequency of rule change, which is presently greatly emphasised by regulators and the Government as part of the reasoning behind the Bill, yet somehow I doubt that rule churning was what industry felt it was signing up for by supporting FiSMA. It will be important to understand the scale and nature of that rule tweaking. Amendment 104 gets in part to that with the Government producing a report, but perhaps it should be part of the annual report or an annual impact assessment from the regulators, so that it can be further queried and those regulated can be interviewed by the relevant parliamentary committee. So perhaps the Minister can confirm how this frequency of tweaking will be tracked, what is the Government’s planned part in it and would they support Amendment 104 in particular as part of the way to do that?