My Lords, I am afraid that I return to the most overworked clause in the Bill, namely Clause 2, subsection (3) of which states:
“The single financial guidance body may do anything that is incidental or conducive to the exercise of its functions”.
Do Ministers genuinely think that that single provision can deal with the breadth of expectation that will be placed on the body, particularly as regards research? It is true that there is a power there, provided that it is “incidental”, whatever that means,
“or conducive to the exercise of its functions”.
Presumably, that can be tested in court if there is any doubt about what it means.
However, let us assume that Clause 2(3) provides the foundation on which a research function will be carried out by this body. The question is then threefold. First, a lot of research is being done in this area, which is all to the good. It is being done by the FCA, which we have talked about a lot, but many others do research which could be brought into scope in this area. Are we confident that the research being done by the commercial sector, banks, the FCA and the SFGB, if it should be
able to fund that and start doing it, will fit well within that arrangement? Can Ministers assure us that there will be no blockage if this arrangement is the only way that a body can take that research forward? That is my first general point: do we have competence in this regard and is the constitution sufficient to carry it?
My second and third questions are about scale. Secondly, the problem with this is that we have a lot of information which could perhaps be collated by the body and made available in digestible form. The information that we have been talking about in the FCA report would be slightly indigestible if it was not for the very excellent graphics and graphs it produced which allow us to get into it and make it easier to understand and absorb. However, if we think about the range of issues that could be brought to bear in relation to problem debt and financial capability, we are talking about a very significant volume of activity and work that has to be done.
We should add to that the fact that most of the research is, for good and persuasive reasons, snapshot research—the sort of research which looks at something happening at a particular moment in time. The report from the FCA spans two years but effectively one fiscal year has been chosen, out of which have come the figures. But to understand the causes of unmanageable debt and the way to prevent it we need longitudinal studies. Will the body we are discussing have the resources, the capacity and, most importantly, the constitution to undertake work on that scale? That is very different from being just an incidental part of the function: this is mainstream stuff. It will start now and run for 30 years across a life cycle—perhaps longer—to try to understand what causes unmanageable debt across huge populations, not just in samples. Without that information we will not get the detailed granularity we need to make sure that progress is being made in this area.
Thirdly, we are seeing this through the prism of financial capacity. That, of course, is inevitable given where we are starting from. However, as has been stated in many speeches today, and was certainly raised in Committee, the problem with finance is that it is the end product of a lot of other factors that are going on, all of which I argue also need to be researched. Again, I ask: does the wording,
“The single financial guidance body may do anything that is incidental or conducive to the exercise of its functions”,
really catch the need to look at health data, the Tesco card, the purchase of cigarettes or whatever we will use to build a picture of what is happening in relation to people’s consumption and their use of the funds they have to enable them to do what they want to do in terms of what the Data Protection Bill, which we are about to go on to, describes as human flourishing?
That term has been coined to try to think through the issues relating to individuals and humans in relation to the work of robots. As citizens we will often be unable to determine whether decisions have been reached by robotic means or by persons. Many people who have campaigned on that Bill argue that we have to remain focused on what will help humans to flourish, not just on how automated machines will work. I am sorry about the digression, but I will tackle that Bill next and it is in my mind as I speak.
The issue remains: do we have confidence that the wording will get us to the point where we can make sure that the body will be able to command both the legal personality to do what it is required and also the funding and resources to carry out a really good job of bringing together so much material, over such a large range of activities, to research what is happening in the debt space particularly? I beg to move.
8.30 pm