My Lords, I thank both the noble Lord and the noble Baroness for their contributions to this debate and for their ongoing participation in debates on financial services and the expertise they bring to them.
As the Committee will know, the Treasury took extensive action to provide certainty for firms around the end of the transition period, and the Government continue to engage extensively with industry. I hope the Committee can rest assured that the Government will continue to do what it takes to ensure that the UK remains the best place in the world to do financial services business.
I am happy to provide the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, with an update on the negotiations with the EU on financial services, although I note that the provisions within this statutory instrument are not subject to any further negotiations or equivalence decisions. Indeed, the EU does not have an equivalence process or a third-country regime for settlement finality, thus the UK created the third-country regime to designate non-UK systems as part of the original statutory instrument.
However, on the broader question of ongoing negotiations on financial services, technical discussions with the EU on the text of the memorandum of understanding on financial services regulatory co-operation have now concluded. The MoU, once signed, will establish the Joint UK-EU Financial Regulatory Forum, which will serve as a platform to facilitate dialogue on financial services issues, including our respective frameworks
and any discrete equivalence issues or changes. This is an important step forward in normalising the future relationship on financial services between the UK and the EU. The Treasury is now working to operationalise our future relationship with the EU on financial services, on the basis of the trade and co-operation agreement and the MoU.
In reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, I say that the original design of the temporary designation regime was to allow three years for the Bank of England to assess all applications for permanent designation under the UK regime. The amendment proposed in this SI does not change that, and we still expect all applications to be assessed by the end of 2023. We expect UK firms that are members of EEA systems which enter into the run-off regime to put contingency plans in place to ensure that they are prepared for any actions that those systems may take as a result of losing UK insolvency protections on 30 June 2023.
The Bank of England publishes a list of all EEA systems that are in the temporary designation regime. The list currently published is of those who notified to enter the regime. After 30 June, only those which submitted an application will remain and a new list will be published so that firms using the services of these organisations will be aware of who has entered the application process, and who has entered the run-off period and does not seek to be designated.
I thank the noble Lords and the noble Baroness once again for this short debate. I commend this instrument to the Committee.