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Financial Services and Markets Bill [HL]

My Lords, I disagree with what my noble friend Lord Blackwell has just said. He has fallen into the trap of believing that an accountability process can be effective within Parliament. The experience that I and my committee have had is that there are limits to what can be achieved in terms of parliamentary accountability. That is one of the reasons why there are other amendments later in this Bill to find other mechanisms for improving accountability.

It is important to differentiate between those areas where Parliament has a right to be democratically involved in the decisions and those areas that can safely be left to the regulators to carry out the detail and to be held accountable for that. It is the balance that we are concerned about. I would probably end up with a different decision on whether certain of the protections in the existing legislation need to be retained as well as on improving the way in which the legislation works by updating it to a modern digital age. There is genuinely a case for looking again at whether the sanctions that exist in the consumer credit legislation are right for today’s world. I believe that some of them are too severe or can be disproportionate to the issues that are involved in practice—for example, minor breaches in relation to enforcement notices.

I would not necessarily end up with the view that what is currently in the legislation must be preserved for all time, but I think that Parliament needs an involvement in some of those key decisions about the parameters of where liability exists and what sort of sanctions can be applied. That is why I think that we must constantly differentiate between democratic oversight and parliamentary accountability. They are complementary but different things.