REAL HELP NOW THAT BUILDS A STRONGER BRITAIN FOR THE FUTURE

Financial services and business bill

Promoting stability, efficiency and competition in financial markets, taking action to reduce the frequency and impact of systemic financial crises and promoting efficiency and competition by:

• renewing financial regulation including strengthening regulation (including to cover all important institutions) to reduce the systemic risk of markets and to enable a wider approach to regulation;
• protecting and supporting consumers to boost financial capability and tighten up consumer-focused regulation. In particular to enable spending on a national money guidance service;
• improving efficiency and competition in financial markets including considering ways to strengthen the diversity of market participants, as well as action to maintain the competitive position of the UK as the leading global financial centre;
• toughening regulation of the financial system to ensure that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has sufficient powers to do its job. For example, the Government is examining powers to:

i. suspend individuals or firms for misconduct or to penalise individuals who should have sought approval to perform a controlled function but did not do so;
ii. freestanding powers to take certain emergency actions for the purposes of financial stability, including placing restrictions on short selling and requiring disclosure of short selling;
iii. strengthen the FSA's statutory objective and governance in respect of consumer education;

• banning unsolicited credit card cheques - these cheques contribute to drawing people further into debt than they intended to go by making accessible a form of credit which often attracts higher interest rates than card purchases; can carry a handling fee and can come without the protections available when using credit cards themselves. The Government will be consulting on the proposed framework of a ban shortly in the context of the upcoming Consumer White Paper.

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