Clause 3 - Amendment of the Financial Services Act 1986
Promotion of Volunteering Bill
3:00 pm
Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury, Conservative)
I beg to move that the clause stand part of the Bill.
I promised that I would be extremely brief on each clause, but as a point for discussion, I shall give a short explanation to the Committee of why I originally tabled them.
Clause 3 deals with the role of the Financial Services Authority in regulating the insurance market as it affects sporting and other recreational clubs. Someone may well ask what that means, as no one thought that the Bill would affect sporting and other recreational clubs. I agreed to include the clause simply to draw attention to the fact that, bizarrely, the FSA has announced its intention shortly to treat sporting and other governing bodies that have in-house compulsory insurance as though they were insurance advisers, with all the paperwork and bureaucracy that that entails.
To give rugby as an example, one of my sons attended a school that did not play rugby, so every Sunday I took him to Whitstable rugby football club—an excellent organisation that I am proud to have attended every Sunday for two years. It has a compulsory insurance policy as laid down by its national governing body, and the arrangement is excellent. It means that all the rugby clubs in the country and the governing body are properly insured. The whole thing is watertight; it is a good arrangement.
Under the FSA's plans, the governing body will shortly be treated as an insurance adviser, because it is giving to its members advice—in fact, more than advice; it is giving orders—about insurance. It seems absolutely bizarre that we should be imposing such bureaucracy on rugby or any other kind of sporting clubs. For the reasons that I gave earlier, I shall not insist on the clause, but I wanted to put those points on record.