Alison Gay, senior public affairs consultant at the Lang Cat, shared her insights from the second day of the Labour Party's conference which took place in Liverpool yesterday (September 24).
It’s not easy to distill two fairly intense days of policy overload and pick out the key themes, especially when you have Duran Duran circulating in your head, and for that I can thank City Minister Tulip Siddiq.
Not because she dances on the sand (although she may well, for all I know, with Angela Rayner in Ibiza), but because her big regulatory initiative is the new Regulatory Innovation Office, inevitably to be known as RIO. It’s not a new idea, it was first promoted at the end of last year and featured heavily in the manifesto, but it’s starting to come to life.
RIO will be the catalyst for innovation, and innovation will be the building blocks for growth. And you couldn’t go anywhere this week without hearing building metaphors – Rachel Reeves on Monday with her shovels, Keir Starmer on Tuesday ‘fixing foundations for working people’ and ‘brick by brick, building a better home’.
All ministers were keen to point out that the way forward will be the new industrial strategy for the country as a whole and that financial services will be an integral part of that, not an individual silo. Regulation is a key lever of that strategy. The idea of RIO is that it will improve accountability and promote innovation by setting targets for the regulators and holding them accountable.
Which is an interesting concept for independent regulators such as the FCA more used to having statutory objectives. In public they’re all for the idea, especially given that their regulatory sandbox initiatives are considered as genuinely world leading, but the FCA may be less keen in the future if the Treasury chooses to park its tanks on their front lawn.
One area of potential tension is the ongoing consultation on publicising enforcement actions (the ‘naming and shaming’ consultation). The FCA is keen on the idea for regulatory transparency and consumer protection reasons, but the Minister has apparently asked for ‘extra briefing’ on the subject and will be making her views known. The consultation is now closed, but it sounds like there might be some awkward conversations behind the scenes before the response is published.
Following on from the discussions yesterday about the FCA’s call for input on ways to simplify the handbook there was more discussion about the consequences of ‘decluttering’ regulation.
On a day when the prime minister confirmed proposals for Duty of Candour legislation for a legal obligation on public servants to be open and honest when something goes wrong, there was a very pointed question from one of the audience members to the City Minister.
At the root of the disasters the new legislation is designed to prevent in future, such as the Grenfell Tower fire, was the easing of rules and regulations. The government and the FCA are at pains to point out that they are seeking to remove out of date and obsolete regulations, rather than a wholesale clearout of awkward rules inconvenient to the industry, but there remains a tension between consumer protection and innovation.
