Financial Services Bill

Part of the debate – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:00 pm on 10 December 2009.

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Simon Gleeson: Two thoughts on the new body. One is that it is generally agreed that the FSA’s retail distribution review process will substantially reduce the number of private sector IFAs in the country, and will eliminate the availability of private sector independent financial advice for large numbers of the lower-paid. Frankly, if they don’t get the service they are in dire trouble.

How do you measure its success? It would be nice to think that you could measure it by a reduction in complaints to the ombudsman, or something along  those lines. I have done some work in this area, and I am aware that none of those metrics seems to give any useful answer. It is a conclusion that I think the FSA has stated in a lot of the research work into the market that it makes publicly available, but I don’t think it knows either.