Part of Financial Services and Markets Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:00 pm on 27 October 2022.
Andrew Griffith
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, The Economic Secretary to the Treasury
2:00,
27 October 2022
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon for raising this important issue, and I note the potential, in-principle support of the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn, speaking for the Opposition.
The Government agree that it is vital to have appropriate public metrics for holding regulators to account on their performance. FSMA already requires regulators to report annually on how they have discharged their functions, advanced their objectives and complied with their other duties. In addition, schedules 1ZA and 1ZB to FSMA provide that the Treasury may direct a regulator to include such other matters as it deems appropriate in the regulator’s annual report.
As part of their annual reports, both the Financial Conduct Authority and the PRA publish data on operational performance. The FCA annually publishes operating service metrics relating to authorisations, timeliness of responses to stakeholders, and regulatory permission requests, among other things. In April 2022, the FCA also published a comprehensive set of outcomes and metrics that it will use to measure and publicly report on its performance. The PRA annually publishes data on its performance of authorisation processes.
Amendment 48 seeks to allow the Treasury, in addition, to determine what metrics the FCA and the PRA should use to measure their performance and over what period, and other technical aspects of the measurement and publication of metrics. Let me reassure my hon. Friend of the importance that I attach to the matter he has raised. I have discussed it with the CEOs of the PRA and the FCA since taking up my role, and I will continue to do so. I am open to discussing the matter with my hon. Friend outside the Committee to see what further reassurance the Government could give, or what further measures we could take. I therefore ask him to withdraw his amendment.
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