Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he has had recent discussions with the FCA on the effectiveness of its consumer duty in upholding standards of financial services for customers.

The Government is committed to ensuring the UK has world-leading levels of regulatory operational effectiveness and to ensuring that consumers of financial services have appropriate protections in place. The Consumer Duty aims to ensure that firms act to deliver good outcomes and seeks to set a higher and clearer standard of care that firms owe their customers.

Treasury ministers meet regularly with the FCA to discuss a range of topics including the Consumer Duty.

With any new policy intervention, it is appropriate to consider how effective it has been in meeting its objectives, once such an assessment can be made. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 introduced a new requirement on the financial services regulators to keep their rules under review, and to publish a statement of policy for how they conduct rule reviews. The FCA’s rule review framework can be found at https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/corporate-documents/our-rule-review-framework.