Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) Order 2020

Lord Mann Excerpts

Wednesday 6th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the Minister on the eloquence of her introduction and the Government on bringing forward this timely statutory instrument. I suppose I should declare an interest of sorts in that I am almost certainly the only qualified gravestone topple tester in Parliament. I have taken quite a significant interest in all matters relating to funerals, particularly burials. The need to regulate on this was raised under previous Governments with less success.

The kinds of people who plan for funerals in this way are very identifiable. Over the years, I have met and discussed the issue with many of them. They are easily recognisable: they are the kind of people who live in tidy houses, with tidy gardens. They volunteer; they will be volunteering to assist with Covid and matters relating to vaccinations. They are the bedrock of everything decent about the country. These people care about everything around them and, therefore, care about leaving everything in order when their time has gone. That motivation means that people tend to utilise such a service. The danger is that they perhaps place too high a value on it, and the mis-selling of the wrong or wrongly priced product has long been a concern. The beauty of the order is that any complaint about that, whenever it comes—by definition it could sometimes be made by someone from another generation rather than from the person who contracted the service—will shift the market towards good provision.

I have seen too many cases of trauma, usually when a husband dies leaving a wife or vice versa, when a funeral plan does not meet expectation. They had no idea that was going to happen. A lifetime of careful budgeting, of caution and living in a proper, very British way, as they would see it, blows up in their face. That is the importance of this, well beyond the appropriate, standard regulation of a financial product in a market. This is important in terms of the ethics of the country. The change it makes in cases where things go wrong, and the ability to do something about it, is disproportionately significant for the people impacted. I therefore thank the Government and the Minister for bringing this forward.