Conservative MPs have accused the financial services regulator of “mission creep” by seeking to expand its remit to include stamping out sexism in the City. The Telegraph has the story.
Fourteen MPs in the Common Sense Group have now written to the Government criticising the FCA’s proposals.
Signatories include Sir John Hayes, the Chairman of the group, Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger and former ministers Caroline Johnson and Jonathan Gullis.
The letter, which has been sent to Andrew Griffith, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, takes issue with the “proposal by the FCA to impose stricter rules on firms in an attempt to stamp out sexism in the City of London”.
It adds: “We are of course wholly supportive of the ambition to stop sexism, and most of all sexual harassment and abuse, in the workplace.
“However, a wide range of laws (including criminal law, employment law and equalities law) and enforcement agencies already exist to protect employees’ rights.
“The FCA’s role is confined solely to protecting consumers by promoting competition and ensuring market integrity. This is a vital role, regulating the largest sector of our economy – a sector which, in addition to the wealth it generates for the U.K., gives tremendous career opportunities to women.”
The letter says that the FCA’s justification for expanding its remit to target non-financial misconduct on the grounds that it can affect the performance of businesses and the wider market is “tendentious”.
It warns that any resources dedicated to such activities will be “taken from the genuine purposes of the FCA, namely helping to ensure the City of London is a competitive and dynamic financial centre”.
The MPs also claim it is part of a “very concerning pattern of behaviour by the regulator”, referring to how the FCA has called for workplaces to be “psychologically safe” for employees.
Worth reading in full.
Toby says:
A large percentage of the work we do at the Free Speech Union involves defending people from complaints made by political activists to professional regulators. Without exception, these complaints are thoroughly investigated, often over the course of several months. If the FCA requires financial companies to guarantee their employees feel ‘psychologically safe’, that will open the door to thousands of vexatious, politically motivated complaints.
The full text of the letter reads as follows.
Dear Andrew,
We write as members of the Common Sense Group of MPs, with reference to the proposal by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to impose stricter rules on firms in an attempt to stamp out sexism in the City of London. Harassment of any kind has no place in good businesses or in the world of work.
We are of course wholly supportive of the ambition to build and maintain workplaces which are respectful and harmonious. However, a wide range of laws (including criminal law, employment law and equalities law) and enforcement agencies already exist to protect employees’ rights. The FCA’s role is confined solely to protecting consumers by promoting competition and ensuring market integrity. This is a vital role, regulating the largest sector of our economy – a sector which, in addition to the wealth it generates for the UK, gives tremendous career opportunities to women.
It is striking that despite its own name the Financial Conduct Authority considers “non-financial misconduct” to be within its remit (on the tendentious grounds that these forms of misconduct can affect the performance of a business and the wider market).
We were concerned to read in the letter from Nikhil Rathi, CEO of the FCA, to the Treasury Select Committee in June this year, that the organisation “[has] significantly increased resources” devoted to investigating non-financial misconduct. These are resources that are taken from the genuine purposes of the FCA, namely helping to ensure the City of London is a competitive and dynamic financial centre.
This is part of a very concerning pattern of behaviour by the regulator.
A public consultation document already issued by the FCA threatens to require companies with over 250 employees to introduce formal diversity and inclusion strategies. The FCA then proposes that firms be required to set targets based upon these strategies. The FCA’s approach uses contested concepts like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘equity’ throughout its proposed model.
Perhaps most troublingly, the regulator requires regulated firms to create workplaces that are “psychologically safe” for employees. One need only look at the ‘safe space phenomenon’ at universities that the Government legislated to stop to see that this new proposal risks creating a regulator-backed cancel culture in financial services.
A separate letter issued last week by the FCA to insurance companies says the FCA’s diagnosis that “areas for improvement” in the sector “include improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)”. The FCA goes on to say that it will ensure “firms meets our requirements” around DEI and that the regulator is “ready to use our full range of regulatory tools, including enforcement action, against firms and individuals where we see instances of non-financial misconduct”.
In short, we fear that this regulator has adopted an activist interpretation far removed from the principle of equality that our voters would understand or support.
We would be grateful if you could reassure us that the Government does not support the decision of the FCA to impose more onerous expectations on businesses; and that the Government considers the remit of the FCA to be restricted to its statutory obligations, without the ‘mission creep’ apparent this week.
Yours etc
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The firkin state this country is in and the deadbeats at the FCA want to waste more time and money on stamping out “sexism in the city.” This is the FCA wholly culpable in 2008.
This isn’t Victorian Britain.
Is anybody drawing wages from the taxpayers actually doing any work?
What is blatantly obvious is that the FCA is severely WEF infiltrated because this sexism bollox is straight up ESG nonsense.
Can’t we have some tractor figures just to complete the picture, oh and one of those five year plan thingies.
FCA – sack the bleeding lot, we need as a country, to save a few bob.
Whoever are theb 8 who down voted this? Have they no understanding of the purpose of the FCA and its serious failings.
The FCA is funded by the firms it regulates. Just pointing that out.
They have no business increasing the regulatory burden on firms though. It’s already sky high and we have a millionty rules on ESG etc already as the banks and so on need them to meet their ESG box ticking for their ESG ratings, so that they can get clients.
It’s a giant circle w@nk.
Thanks Sophie. I spent 17 years in the financial services industry. My brother has his own company. I know what it’s like.
We’ve already got five year plans in the form of the CCC setting carbon budgets that the government is legally obliged to meet as part of the climate change act. We’ve already got production targets in the form of companies being fined huge amounts if they don’t sell enough EVs or heat pumps.
Tractors are so 20th century, aren’t you happy with figures for the amount of renewable capacity installed. Just like Soviet tractors that were crap but counted towards production targets renewables do bugger all half the time but count towards targets for installed capacity.
FCA simple did what Gordon Brown, the Prime Moron who set up the FCA, allowed them to do. As with so much of the financial disaster we have been witnessing for 15 years, Brown’s fingerprints are all over it – witness that we are still printing money as if it had just been invented.
The fruit of much hard work by the FCA’s all-conquering DEI team, no doubt, keen to extend their benign influence over the FCA’s subject companies.
The FCA shouldn’t have any involvement in sexual politics. Too many organisation are getting involved with things irrelevant to their purpose.
The Tories have been promising a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ for decades. Nothing ever happens. The BBC continues to broadcast liberal trash, funded by a poll tax, Channel 4 continues to drive down media standards and the quangocracy grows ever bigger, along with the state. If someone nuked Whitehall a decade ago on the day of the State Opening of Parliament, I reckon the country would have ticked over perfectly well for the last ten years.
That is a lot of creeps.
If the FCA thinks that it has the time and resources to extend its remit then, surprise, surprise, it is clearly severely overstaffed.
Slash its budget by 50% so that its mission creeps back to from whence it came.
Now that’s common sense.
Thia and other wokist activities are the preferred activity of all quangos, NGOs and tax payer fuinded “charities”. Fsr easier than delivering the stated objectives of the organiosation.
Look at the objectives of the FSA / FCA s set in law. These have not been met and not really attempted. I believe the Chancellor has Ministerial responsibility for the FCA and PRA but there is not a cat in hell’s chance he will bring them into line any more than previous chancellors have done.
Gongs all round for having non-binaries on the payroll.
This is really much too defensive. The FCA has no general political mandate. The moment someone publically(!) states that he plans to abuse the FCA budget to police anything but financial conduct, that someone needs to be forcibly shown the door because this is just fraud: Someone being unable to resist the temptation to misuse public funds to feed his hobby horses. He could as well send all the money to some of his buddies in Africa and claim this would be foreign aid and thus, obviously laudable.
What a load of self-interested cobblers from the FCA. Plus ca change.
Should you need another expert (girl…) witness, Toby, pleased to step up. Worked in the City since the 80s.
Happy to be contacted by your team direct.