The True & Fair Campaign, led by co-founders Gina and Alan Miller, has published its latest report, Asleep at the wheel, an expose of systemic regulatory failure and consumer detriment in the UK financial services sector.
The True & Fair Campaign, led by co-founders Gina and Alan Miller, has published its latest report, Asleep at the wheel, an expose of systemic regulatory failure and consumer detriment in the UK financial services sector.
The report is a damning indictment of the FCA and in particular its departing CEO Andrew Bailey, who has been appointed the next governor of the Bank of England.
At the launch of the report, Gina Miller said that, since the 2012 launch of the True and Fair Campaign, they have been increasingly appalled at what they have uncovered in the financial services sector.
“It is as if the industry has forgotten that at the end of every product collapse there is a human cost,” she said.
“Too many good people say the right things behind closed doors but when it comes to doing the right thing, they say there is nothing we can do. There is a cultural vacuum in the financial services sector that cannot carry on.”
The report emphasises that financial services is one of the UK economy’s most important sectors, representing 7.1 per cent of GDP.
“The last four years have seen a multiple pile-up of mis-selling scandals and incidents of regulatory failure. It has witnessed the repeated and wanton abdication of responsibility by leading market participants across markets and product sets, almost always in pursuit of short-term profit. Worst of all, it has demonstrated a breathtaking betrayal of the trust that it rightly owed by so-called financial services professionals to their investors and employees, without any equitable redress.”
At the launch, Gina Miller said: “Time is up on the industry putting things right…four years under Andrew Bailey has seen an increase in a cocktail of toxic negligence, incompetence and indifference at the FCA. On his watch hundreds and thousands of people have lost money.”
Alan Miller said that at the FCA, the amount of fines imposed have dropped each year for the last four years to the point where they are now 78 per cent less compared with the four years prior to that.
The report details a number of ‘failures and scandals’ including HBOS/Lloyds Banking Group; London Capital & Finance; Lendy and Woodford and comments on the culture within the FCA, corporate accountability and insider trading.
In conclusion, the authors of the report write that they: “…are calling on the financial services industry, consumer protection and lobby groups, cross-party MPs, the financial and business media, and the general public to demand that the new Treasury Select Committee urgently call Mr Bailey to answer questions on the litany of financial scandals on his watch at the FCA before confirming his appointment to the Bank of England.”
