My Lords, I will also speak to Amendments 34, 36 and 37. I am afraid this is quite a wide-ranging group, so I may have to put a little time into each of the amendments. We are pointing in slightly different directions here, but there is a common theme, so it is useful to have them together in one group.
We start with our old, standard question about what is advice and what is guidance. The Government are beginning to get themselves into rather bad habits here, if I might be so rude as to suggest that more thinking needs to be done. I am not sure whether other Members of the Committee will also have had the background note to all Peers on defining advice and guidance that I got at 3.46 pm this afternoon. I have not had time to look at it. It was circulated from the Government Whips’ Office. It is quite helpful, and I have been reading it in the interstices of the debate today but, obviously not wishing to miss a word from either of the Ministers or from others participating, I have not been able to focus on it entirely. However, although I look forward to what the Minister may say in response, if I judge it correctly it repeats, in essence, the wording that she used at Second Reading and in earlier stages of Committee on the difference between
advice and guidance. I accept that that is probably as far as we are going to get on this, as it is a three-page document and has quite a lot of detail in it, but I am sure that others present—I am not looking at anyone in particular—might wish to come in on this point later, or indeed on later amendments.
I mention this because Amendment 33 is again probing the definitions of advice and guidance. There is not much point in going into this in any detail other than to say that we now have more information, which may allow us to get a little further down the line on this. If I am right, the advice now being given is that there are quasi-statutory and statutory definitions which will take us down the road of defining financial advice as an activity that involves a personal recommendation to an individual about a particular course of action, rather than the provision of information about a range of options that may be available to them; and that guidance is generally understood to be any service to support clients making investments that is not advice. That presumably needs to be interpreted for the wider range, with an additional comment on what the definition of debt advice is, which is different to the guidance functions delivered and involves activity specifically regulated by the FCA. I will use those as the basis for the further remarks I will make tonight.
Amendment 34 ensures that if a member of the public comes to the new body seeking advice from two or more different functions of the body, they will be able to access it if needed, as opposed to only one function. The intention here is that catching someone as they come into the system means that they stay in the system until the advice or guidance that they want is resolved. I think we all agree that that is important, but it is more obvious in the breach than in the observance. The technology has not always been as good at picking up as we might wish.
The word that is often used in these circumstances is “hot-keying”; in other words, once you have someone on the phone or through a computer system who is engaging with you in the process of trying to resolve their problem regarding any one of the issues that have been dealt with by the SFGB, you do not lose them until you are at least in progress or on a programme—that is, you are informing them or if possible, if it requires more than that, making sure that they stick with it until such time as it is resolved. The amendment is meant to strengthen the arrangements to ensure that we get to the point where we have a seamless approach, however many bodies are involved and however many different operations are required to provide the information, advice and guidance sought.
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Amendment 36 would require the single financial body to work collaboratively with other relevant organisations. Again, this is probably motherhood and apple pie, but the issue here is to ensure that this is given more prominence in the setting up, governance and structures that we have than it appears to be in the Bill. It is not because of any particular suspicion nor because there is a particular concern, because much has been said that we accept to suggest that this is the way in which it is working, but it is not something that
can be understressed. This is particularly true in the debt space but it is true in other areas. There are existing bodies of great substance, with long histories, that work well in the areas that they have done and could well be co-ordinated, directed and led in a way that might be improving for the system as a whole, and no one is against that. The idea that this will be done by one body and two others is not the mode that we are trying to address here. We want a collaborative approach, and we think that changing the wording slightly might help. I wait to hear how Ministers respond to that.
Amendment 37 is slightly different. It points to another issue that has come up, which the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, has mentioned: what exactly the relationship is between the SFGB and the bodies that operate either through the Government in Scotland, as happens, or in agencies supported by the assemblies in Wales and—when it is working—Northern Ireland. We need to be given a little more detail than is in the Bill. It is fine to say that the responsibility lies with the SFGB, when formed, to work with those organisations in the national regions, but that does not appear to point in quite the same direction as creating a national structure that serves all citizens even though the way it is done is different wherever they happen to live. The Scottish Government have played a distinguished role in setting up, supporting and developing ideas around this space, particularly the debt space, but they also deal with all problems that people have. There was substantial buy-in from local government and from other areas in Scotland, which is to be commended. It is a bit sad that that has been reduced in recent years. Independent bodies have been set up, many of which are charities and are well regulated by the Scottish Charity Regulator, that deal with the day-to-day operations, and it would be rather annoying—to put it mildly—if the good intentions displayed in the Bill were in any way to disrupt the arrangements up there.
That has particular resonance when we look at the question of the breathing space, which we have referred to on a number of occasions and to which I hope we will return on Report. It is clear that the breathing space arrangements made in Scotland work well. A way has been developed of engaging with those creditors who operate north of the border that is to their satisfaction as well as that of the consumers, and is run efficiently and effectively by Accountant in Bankruptcy, based in Kilwinning in Scotland. We argue—we have been resisted so far but we hope to overturn this at later stages if we cannot persuade the Government otherwise—that this breathing space is now ready and mature and should be brought down and immediately implemented here. We look forward to further discussions on that. If that is the case, that cements even more the requirement to think carefully about the relationship between the SFGB and the bodies that operate in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
We focus on Scotland because Scotland has an advanced way of dealing with these issues. The situation in Wales is different, not because of any practical arrangements but simply because—this is my personal view, although it would be interesting to hear comments from others on it—the intellectual underpinning there
borrows more from a more holistic view of deprivation and vulnerability than we see even in Scotland, and certainly in England. A much more holistic approach is easier in a smaller country such as Wales. It involves, almost without exception—without any comment or criticism—a much closer relationship with issues such as housing than you would find in other territories. That is something that we have not really dealt with here but I might commend to those who are looking at this body as to how it might think again about that. Indeed, we have an amendment coming up shortly that might pave the way for further discussion on that issue.
The situation in Northern Ireland is different again. The Government there are much more active, although obviously in the present situation I am not quite sure who is running things. The arrangements there, although very similar on the ground, are completely different in terms of the bodies involved. Again, we need to respect both how that operates and the way in which it might influence future decisions. I hope very much that the current phrasing of the Bill does not prevent good and constructive engagement with those bodies and organisations in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland doing good and productive work that is not necessarily in the same model developed in England.
While in Northern Ireland, I will also just look south. Obviously we are heading into territory that was well covered yesterday evening, for those of us who were able to listen to the very good debate on the Brexit issues for Ireland. I mention it only because it is increasingly observable in Ireland that there is a movement together of the systems that operate north and south of the border. It is not a hard border at the moment, and long may that remain the case. It is permeable in many different ways, and one of those is the banking and financial systems. It is very important that again we do not try to see this as a UK-only, or even England-only, problem that we need to solve by sitting around and discussing only the issues that come to us because they are close to us. There are different ways of doing things in Northern Ireland but they are not that far apart from what happens in the Republic in relation to the different ways in which people save and borrow. The big difference is credit unions, of which there is virtually no experience of any substance in England, although the situation is better in Scotland and probably less good in Wales. It is a very different mode of operating an activity. Lessons could be learned from that. I put that down simply as a marker of something that we need to think hard about as we go down this track.
Those are four rather different amendments. We may not resolve the one about advice and guidance today. We will want to come back to some of that, although it is helpful that we now at least have a statement from the Government, however late it was. We need to ensure that we always think hard about how we retain people who approach the system as a whole, and ensure that their problems are not compounded by having different functions doing different things. It probably needs more work than is possible through this amendment but it is a very important issue.
The need for collaboration has been the basis on which we have made progress in this area, along with the requirement to look carefully at how we operate in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to ensure that we get the best out of the system for the good of the whole. I beg to move.