Conference season promised bonfires of red tape. Read closely, the more interesting contest was about something else: who should make regulation’s trade-offs.
With the Financial Services and Markets Bill due for Commons second reading on 10 November, I set the parties’ positions against a simple ladder – Parliament, ministers, regulators, supervisors – and looked at which rung each proposal reaches for.
Labour, the Conservatives and the Centre for a Better Britain all reach for the ministers’ rung, by different routes. The Liberal Democrats would hand much of the choice to a negotiated EU framework. The Lords went the other way: they removed two Treasury powers and added clause 25’s limits on skilled person reviews.
In 2023 the worry was regulators deciding without being seen. The risk now is ministers deciding without being seen either.
If ministers are to own the trade-off, three tests apply: write it down as an outcome, put it before Parliament, and answer for it when the downside arrives. None of the proposals on offer meets them yet.
The full article and a table covering the parties and think tank proposals can be found in Other Articles. See link below.
https://www.abettermousetrap.blog/s/Who-Holds-the-Tiller.pdf