Gareth Thomas
MP for Harrow West · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“Local councils such as Harrow need to invest more in youth facilities that divert young people away from crime. Some of the CCTV projects in my constituency that Harrow council has turned down—in Wealdstone, south Harrow and central Harrow—should get funding.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle and Clitheroe (Jonathan Hinder) on securing the debate and on the way in which he approached the subject. I join him and my hon.”
“I also want to suggest that the Metropolitan police does not get recognition across the whole of the UK for its hugely important work in tackling national and international crime, and that perhaps more recognition of that is required in the funding formula.”
“In particular, in Harrow, we recently saw enforcement teams contracted out to an organisation called Kingdom. The responsibility for that contract was with Harrow council. There was widespread criticism of the way some of the staff employed by Kingdom tried to levy fines on a number of young people in south Harrow, in my constituency.”
“One way we can further support the Metropolitan police is by allowing it to keep more of the proceeds from successful operations, such as recovering stolen funds hidden in bitcoin assets. I congratulate my hon.”
“Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has done a huge amount to try to redirect funding from other parts of his budget to minimise the impact of that cut.”
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“Unless those credit unions can be helped to expand and offer a wider range of products, they too will face difficult cost pressures. I know that the Minister is committed to bringing forward legislation to allow some expansion of credit union services, and I welcome that. It would be good to hear that the timescale for that to happen was being sped up. From what I gather, it is a set of changes that, welcome as they are, are not yet ambitious enough. I therefore gently encourage him to consider a more specific programme to encourage a whole range of commercial and public sector organisations to encourage people to join their local community credit union.”
“Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) mentioned post office closures. I fear that those are the beginning of a pattern of closures that Royal Mail is also likely to engage in unless there is ministerial pressure to bring about a change of heart. The ability to withdraw and deposit cash is absolutely what makes the bank closures important. If Ministers will not mandate banks and post offices to maintain existing numbers of bank branches, it will undoubtedly become much harder for people to use cash. I will use my remaining time to drill down into and encourage the Minister to look at one potential solution: community credit unions. Although they recognise the cost of community branches having a physical presence in their community, they have made a deliberate policy decision to go ahead and set up branches.”
“I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for securing the debate and for the way she introduced it. I, too, think that banks should be mandated to stay as members of LINK, and that the pressure on banks relating to costs and to their desire to maximise profits, which has led to so many bank branches closing, is unlikely to dissipate any time soon unless Ministers take action. The hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) referred to a big meeting that is taking place in the City, but I fear that it will not lead to a whole slew of new bank branches opening. In fact, the pressure on banks to continue the programme of closures means that we will continue to live with it unless Ministers take action. The right hon.”
“I want to take the hon. Gentleman back to the point made by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake). Is not the problem the fact that we are being asked by the Government to believe that, as a result of the Gloster report, the FCA has fundamentally changed and that there is not going to be a problem ever again with how the FCA regulates? Is there not a need for another body to keep oversight of the quality of financial regulation, and perhaps in particular over whether the FCA continues to do its job properly in the future?”
“I appreciate that the FCA has not only had a change of personnel but brought forward proposals for a consumer duty to try to rebuild some confidence. However, my problem with the duty, which it consulted on until the end of July, is that there is no sense of understanding the difference between consumers who also own a business—a mutual in this case—and consumers per se, or a willingness to take additional actions for consumers who are also owners. I worry about whether that additional duty will be robust enough.”
“I wonder whether there is not a frog in hot water-type problem here, with the FCA so close to the Liverpool Victoria board in this case—and potentially to other financial firms—that it fails, perhaps accidently, to do its job on behalf of consumers with sufficient robustness. I welcome the Dame Elizabeth Gloster report, which was excoriating in its findings. To pick out some key concerns, it said that there were “unclear” policy documents for use by FCA staff, a “flawed approach to the Perimeter” and a “failure to consider” the behaviour of particular businesses holistically. It also said that there was insufficient training of staff and pointed to confusion between Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the FCA—our regulators—over the handling of particular issues.”
“As the House knows, I have taken a particular interest in the demutualisation of Liverpool Victoria. That is very different from the case of LCF, so it would not be appropriate for me to go into the particular details, but there are parallels in the treatment of Liverpool Victoria consumers and those of LCF products. Some of those parallels relate to the culture that appears to exist within the FCA. The all-party parliamentary group for mutuals received a letter from the FCA and one from the PRA, and they reveal that there have been almost 60 meetings between the regulators and the board of Liverpool Victoria, but not one meeting with its consumer-owners on its demutualisation.”
“I am sympathetic to the broad thrust of the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) and his concern, which I alluded to in my intervention, that the Government, and certainly the FCA, appear to be saying, “Don’t worry—we’ve had a change of leadership and everything is going to be all right now. You don’t need to worry about the quality of the regulation of investment firms going forward, or the implementation and enforcement of consumer financial regulation, whether in this case or more generally.” I have some sympathy with the point of the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) that we should be sceptical about such a claim. It is good that Treasury Ministers will be having a more regular dialogue with the FCA, partly as a result of this scandal.”
“It is a small, dedicated body that operates in a completely different sphere from this, but it produces important and useful reports that are used by the relevant Department, experts in the sector and, crucially, the International Development Committee. I wonder whether such a body would be appropriate to keep the PRA and FCA’s feet to the fire. It could be used by the Treasury Committee, and indeed other Committees of the House, to assess the quality of consumer financial regulation and the job that the FCA, PRA and other regulators are doing to protect consumers from any repeat of the LCF debacle.”
“Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) in Committee, whether there is a need for a smaller body that does not just concentrate on the FCA but looks at some of the strategic issues around consumer protection and financial products in particular, and has a small number of inquiries each year looking at the performance of regulators in that regard, in part to help prevent a repeat of the LCF debacle. As a model for such a body—I do not suggest it is perfect—I put on the Floor of the House, so to speak, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which the House uses to consider how our international aid money is being spent and the strategic challenges in that.”
“The hon. Member invests an awful lot of confidence in me to predict what might happen, but I can well understand a Conservative looking to the Labour party for such guidance. I certainly hope that the consumer duty and better enforcement will help to prevent such a terrible debacle from happening again, because, as the House has rightly noted, many good people have lost an awful lot of money and deserve the compensation that the Bill will provide. However, many others who have been victims of similar cases would have also merited better protection from the FCA. I will ponder aloud, in response to the Minister having some sympathy with the points made by the hon. Member for Glenrothes and my right hon.”
“Lastly, the existence in legislation at the moment of provisions for so-called independent experts to look at the decisions that boards are taking in the context of demutualisations are a recipe for regulatory failure. In the case of Liverpool Victoria, independent experts are being appointed by the board, paid by the board and briefed by the board. Obviously, it is fairly easy to predict what the outcome of the independent experts’ work is going to be: to recommend largely what the board wants to happen. That is another issue that needs to be looked at. I put those points on the record to suggest that Ministers should not be complacent about the quality of the FCA’s performance. There needs to be a bit more of a robust challenge and a look again at how financial regulation works.”
“The first is the idea that all the information available to the boards and the management of companies that has to be shared with the FCA and the PRA from time to time should be regarded as commercially sensitive. Clearly, there is genuinely commercially sensitive information that it is right for companies and businesses to keep for themselves. However, I fear—certainly in the case of Liverpool Victoria, which I have been looking at—that the excuse that information is financially sensitive is being used to deny consumers’ legitimate rights to know what the future holds for the business in which they have invested their savings or money. I gently suggest that that topic is worthy of a review in itself, potentially with changes to regulatory practice and, if need be, to legislation.”
“The hon. Member may be right. I simply put out the idea at this stage, and I hope Ministers will be sympathetic to it, that we should not just accept the sense that, following Dame Elizabeth Gloster’s report, the payment of compensation and the introduction by the FCA of this new consumer duty, everything is suddenly all right in the world of consumer financial regulation. Perhaps Ministers on the Treasury Bench are inadvertently suggesting that. I think another step needs to be taken to hold the feet of regulators to the fire. I will briefly raise two other concerns about financial regulation and some of the lessons that need to be taken from the LCF debacle, which the amendment from the hon. Member for Glenrothes helpfully gives me the opportunity to raise.”
“Many people applying for jobs have to jump through a series of stages in the recruitment process before they find out what the salary would be were they to be successful. Is it not time that Ministers sat down with job application platforms such as LinkedIn and told them to require minimum salary levels in adverts?”
“His replacement, Mark Hartigan, was announced just 10 days later, and within less than three months Liverpool Victoria was up for sale—this at a time when assurances of Liverpool Victoria’s continuity as a mutual were being given. Frankly, it is stretching credibility to believe that the decision to sell was the unexpected decision of a strategic review landed by an incoming chief executive with no experience of working for a mutual and after less than three months in the job. What is also remarkable is the decision of the Financial Conduct Authority not to investigate whether members of LV= were deceived into supporting the conversion to a company limited by guarantee.”
“Assuming there is even a small majority voting in favour of demutualisation, this is what LV=’s leadership are now determined to do. Revealingly, in February this year, in a webinar for LV= customers, Mr Cook noted that his plan to demutualise and sell to Bain Capital would not have been possible if they had not converted to a company limited by guarantee. It appears—again, I say this advisedly—that Mr Cook, the chairman of LV=, has been determined to demutualise for some time and has not been straight with the consumer-members of LV=. What has added to that sense is that the previous chief executive of LV, Richard Rowney, left the organisation in December 2019, and it is difficult not to think that he was fired for not wanting to demutualise.”
“The real significance of that change in legal governance only emerged much later. In LV=’s rulebook, to demutualise, it needs a 50% turnout of the membership in any such vote and 75% of those voting to vote in favour. In short, practically, it is impossible—deliberately so. It was a rule put there to protect future consumer-owners of LV= against the greed of carpetbaggers and directors. Given the assurances of Mr Cook, the board and the chief executive, one might have assumed that LV=’s mutual future would continue, notwithstanding the change from a friendly society. Under the rules governing companies, however, boards can approach our courts to ask for a scheme of arrangement for permission to ignore a particular rule in their constitution. That is not currently within the friendly society rules.”
“It is time for the board to be honest. For example, by how much more will the chairman and chief executive benefit if this deal goes ahead? Thirdly, the way in which Liverpool Victoria’s chairman and board have gone about the process of demutualising raises the question as to whether—I say this gently—they knowingly misled the regulator and their customer-owners about their plans. The board of Liverpool Victoria successfully persuaded their members to approve Liverpool Victoria’s conversion from a friendly society to a company limited by guarantee. At the time, they proposed this to their members, the chairman, Mr Cook, explicitly assured members that this would mean no change to the mutual status of Liverpool Victoria. With that assurance, the consumer-owners of LV= approved the conversion to a company limited by guarantee in May 2019.”
“If, for a moment, we take at face value the idea that the new chief executive spotted a major flaw in the business model of his predecessor, so great that significant investment was needed for Liverpool Victoria’s customers to continue to enjoy the fruits of their investment with LV=, then why did they not choose another mutual? Indeed, there are persistent rumours that a major mutual offered more money than Bain Capital offered. The consumer-owners of Liverpool Victoria have a right to know whether that is true and why, if so, it was turned down. Secondly, it is difficult to see how the members or owners of Liverpool Victoria will benefit from the demutualisation. Previous demutualisations have always been driven by the chair, chief executive and board, who usually benefit from significantly enhanced remuneration packages.”
“The business is well capitalised—indeed, it recently sold its general insurance business for over £1 billion—and it has raised significant sums on the capital markets. Both the chairman and the chief executive were arguing that the business was in very good financial shape right up until their plans for putting Liverpool Victoria up for sale were leaked to the media. So why, really, is this plan being pushed? Why can Liverpool Victoria not survive as a stand-alone business in its own right? Its members, I believe, have a right to know.”
“Lastly, we concluded that regulators needed to have a fundamentally different approach to the threat of demutualisation. Indeed, we were staggered that no lessons had been learned from the pre-crash wave of building society demutualisations. I believe now that Alan Cook, the chairman of Liverpool Victoria, has a series of questions to answer about the proposed demutualisation and sale to Bain Capital. Earlier this week I formally invited him to Parliament to enable him to do just that. Since our report was published, and despite many invitations to do so, the leadership of Liverpool Victoria have thus far refused to provide a more open and transparent explanation of their motives and their intentions. First, there has never been a clear, easy-to-understand explanation as to why demutualisation is needed.”
“We concluded that it was very difficult for an individual member of LV= to be able to assess whether the proposed demutualisation was in their interests, given the scarcity of information with which they had been provided. We agreed that, on the basis of the evidence available to us, the leadership of LV= had not been open and transparent with members about its intentions for their business. Indeed, we felt that there had been a notable disregard for the interests of members and a cavalier attitude towards the member governance of the business. We concluded, too, that the plans would damage the diversity of financial services providers in the UK, and that there had been insufficient policy attention on mutuals in recent times, particularly on the need to be able to raise capital.”
“We interviewed Mark Hartigan, who is the current chief executive of Liverpool Victoria, as well as Matt Popoli of Bain Capital, the regulators, the Association of Financial Mutuals and representatives of other mutuals, and we received submissions from individual consumer-owners of Liverpool Victoria. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), my hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Christina Rees), the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), the noble Lords Curry and Wrigglesworth, and Viscount Trenchard for their assistance and support. We have written subsequently to the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, and I have also written to the Pensions Regulator.”
“The proposed demutualisation of Liverpool Victoria is the first proposed demutualisation of a major financial services business since the financial crash. If the demutualisation goes ahead, it will see controversial United States private equity giant Bain Capital given ownership of a British customer-owned business with considerable financial assets. The tidal wave of private equity money apparently available for purchases of British firms prompts the inevitable question of whether this proposed demutualisation is a one-off or whether it is the start of another wave of demutualisation. The all-party parliamentary group for mutuals, which I am fortunate to chair, conducted an inquiry into the proposed demutualisation earlier this year.”
“The FCA should at the very least require the so-called independent experts who have been appointed by LV=’s board, who have been briefed by LV= and who will be paid by LV=, to set up meetings to explain the background to what one presumes will be their inevitable decision to recommend to members a vote for demutualisation and sale to Bain. Will the Minister ask the FCA to make that happen?”
“The failure to consider interlinked business decisions in a holistic way was a fundamental failing identified by Dame Elizabeth Gloster in her devastating report on the London Capital & Finance debacle. This appears to be a clear repeat of that mistake, albeit with a very different business. There are other concerns about the performance of the regulators, the PRA and the FCA. Together, they have admitted that they have had nearly 60 meetings to discuss the demutualisation with the board of LV=, but not one with LV=’s consumers and owners.”
“My hon. Friend and Benenden are right to be concerned about whether there are wider implications and we will see other businesses demutualising. The current vice-chair of Yorkshire Building Society sits on the board of Liverpool Victoria and appears to have been actively involved in the demutualisation plans, prompting a rather obvious question about the future of Yorkshire Building Society. The conversion to a company limited by guarantee and the decision to pursue demutualisation are both fundamental to the treatment of Liverpool Victoria’s consumers. The FCA is refusing to consider both decisions together and to investigate, as I have indicated, whether the chairman in particular and other members of the board knew much earlier than they have been willing to admit thus far that demutualisation was their desired end point.”
“Token windfall payments to members in exchange for their vote will, just like in every other demutualisation, transfer the value from those who contributed and their descendants to those who did not. I gently suggest that that can never be fair, and it is wrong that, to date, our legislative and regulatory regime not only permits that to happen but actively facilitates it.”
“Over time, those small contributions became a substantial sum, and they were augmented by the funds transferred into the friendly society from a series of mergers with other mutuals. In good faith, those other mutuals brought their assets to share with a broader membership for their common purpose. Today, we have the spectacle of a demutualisation that looks to be driven by the simple desire to appropriate this money. None of the promoters of the demutualisation has made any contribution to the accumulation of the assets, yet they want to take advantage of them. It seems that the attraction of the assets means that the executives, the board members and the private equity players will do whatever is necessary to appropriate them.”
“I hope that the Minister will also ask the chief executive of the FCA to revisit the question of whether the owners of LV=—its consumers—were misled when the conversion to a company by guarantee took place. This demutualisation is proof that we need again to celebrate and enhance the position of mutuals in our markets. After all—I say this gently and reluctantly—what is being proposed in the demutualisation of LV= is the looting of nearly two centuries of legacy assets. Of course, it is being dressed up as something different, but that is money built up from the working capital of the business over years of transactions, starting with small contributions from the working people who were the original members of the Liverpool Victoria Burial Society, who set the society up to avoid the Victorian scandal of a pauper’s funeral.”
“For the Government and this Minister in particular—I welcome him to his place, as I know he is diligent in his interest in the mutual sector—I hope that the demutualisation of Liverpool Victoria will be a further wake-up call to look more seriously at the needs of financial mutuals and specifically their ability to raise capital, and to put into law disincentives to demutualise. We need protections for legacy assets, and we need a review of how financial mutuals are regulated under the Financial Services Act 2012. Certainly representations we had from the Association of Financial Mutuals suggest an urgent review to modernise that Act is overdue.”
“My hon. Friend will know that when we saw the last wave of building society demutualisations, there were large numbers of job losses. I gently warn those who work for Liverpool Victoria to be wary of any assurances they have been given about their jobs if the sale to Bain and the demutualisation go ahead. After the financial crash, there was recognition across the House that the wave of demutualisations of building societies had been, at best, a dismal episode, that corporate diversity needed to be encouraged, and that financial mutuals in particular had a crucial role to play in maintaining competition and the interests of consumers.”
“I have two interlinked questions, if I may. First, the Financial Conduct Authority, in its letter to the all-party group of 5 August, made it clear that it had already decided it would not review the interlinkage, or not, of the decision by LV= to convert to a company limited by guarantee and the subsequent proposal to demutualise. I recognise that the Minister cannot intervene with the regulators directly, but he can, as I understand it, because he meets with the chief executive of the FCA, seek an explanation of that decision. Secondly, if the FCA will not engage with that question sufficiently to satisfy me, could he at least ask it to publish the details of the two independent experts appointed by the board of LV= so that customer-owners can begin to make contact with them to ask them questions about what exactly the plans of LV= are?”
“Q10. A working graduate who earns the average wage or under, such as a newly qualified nurse, will face a marginal tax rate of almost 50% under the plans the Prime Minister is bringing in today. Is this not yet another example of the Conservative party asking those on lower incomes to pay more so that his privileged friends have to pay less?”
“The Minister might have seen the media story over the weekend about a suggestion that the UK-Ukraine trade deal, which the Prime Minister signed, contained a series of errors apparently still binding the UK to certain EU rules. I wonder whether she could explain what those mistakes were and how they relate to the statutory instrument, or whether we will have to come back to debate another statutory instrument, given those errors.”
“On the Minister’s point about the need for coherence and clarity, can she explain to the Committee whether the statutory instrument will in any way reduce the extra red tape that the TCA created for businesses, particularly those businesses, say in England, which want to trade with Northern Ireland?”
“None the less, we will not oppose the instrument.”
“How will Ministers help not only musicians and those young people who want to be guides in the ski resorts of our European allies, but, crucially, those in financial service businesses, architects, interpreters, IT installers, management consultants and business traders whose jobs have been made that bit harder and are potentially on the line because Ministers would not do a visa-free trade deal with the European Union? It is a privilege to have the chance to debate the statutory instrument, but it would not have been necessary if Ministers had negotiated a better deal. Sadly, that reflects a growing pattern of mistakes, particularly by the Department for International Trade in negotiating trade deals. One hopes, for the sake of businesses and jobs in our country, that the Government’s performance improves significantly after the recess.”
“Once the Minister has reflected on the debate, I wonder whether she might be willing to acknowledge privately, if not to the Committee now, that some of the other key trade deals that the Government have done are not quite as important as the trade deal that we are discussing today. According to the very best case scenario, the Australia deal will be worth just 0.025% of UK GDP over the next 15 years—and, of course, along the way it will do huge damage to farming, particularly in Scotland and in Wales. The International Trade Secretary’s top deal, the CPTPP, looks set to yield, at best—again, this is according to independent forecasters—only very marginal economic benefits. Surely, improving the poor deal under discussion, which was so badly negotiated by Ministers, is key to our country’s future economic prospects.”
“Is Lord Frost still determined to reject the EU offer on a veterinary agreement, because it would—apparently—prevent Britain from joining the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership? I ask that question in the context of the growing concern about the scale of difficulties that British exporters have faced with post-Brexit red tape and disruption at the UK-EU border, particularly around sanitary and phytosanitary controls. That has led to many businesses and their representatives arguing publicly for a veterinary agreement with the EU.”
“Then there is the Minister’s own boss, who negotiated the Northern Ireland protocol, admitting that some companies in Great Britain have found it “too much trouble” to trade with Northern Ireland and that he had not fully foreseen the “chilling effect” of the punishing new red tape, which has left many smaller firms facing higher costs. There is, too, the sense that the statutory instrument represents a bit of a missed opportunity. Ministers could have used it to build on the deal that was done so late and so badly. Perhaps the Minister will give us some clue about where negotiations with Brussels are on a veterinary agreement, for example.”
“Imagine, Sir Edward, if—God forbid—the French should win the contract to build the Prime Minister’s new super-yacht because of the failure of the Department for International Trade. I raised earlier the example of the UK-Ukraine trade deal, which is one of the most sensitive post-Brexit agreements; indeed, it is the only roll-over deal signed by the Prime Minister. As I said in my intervention on the Minister, some of the errors apparently bind the UK to EU rules. Given all the Government’s talk of not wanting to be bound by EU rules, you might have thought, Sir Edward, that Ministers would have checked that part of the agreement particularly carefully.”
“Let us take the freeports blunder, when the Department for International Trade accidentally ruled out some £35 billion-worth of exports from tariff-free trade for England’s eight new freeports because it included the duty drawback prohibition clauses from those roll-over deals. Then there is of course the Prime Minister’s new yacht. He obviously had had the ambition that only British shipbuilders would bid to make it, yet once again, because Ministers at the Department for International Trade failed to exclude the construction of civilian ships from the list of those contracts that must be open to global competition when it signed the World Trade Organisation’s Government procurement agreement last October, there appear to be some concerns.”
“If the Government could not even do a technical revision before the agreement came into force and ensure that the implementing legislation was final, how on earth could they expect businesses to understand the deal and adapt to a new trading relationship, especially as the Government themselves had admitted that the document was signed too late to allow the lawyers to take a proper look at it? That raises another gentle concern about the instrument and the manner of its being required. This seems to be another example of the Government not properly checking the deals that they have signed. Sadly, there is a growing number of such examples.”
“Let me endorse the fact that it is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward, for this debate on the statutory instrument. Certainly, at first glance, the instrument does not appear particularly contentious, and unless something quite shocking crops up during our debate, we will not try to block its passage. It appears at first glance to be a correction of some 20-plus references in the 2020 Act to the trade and cooperation agreement, although it prompts a number of what I hope the Minister recognises are gentle questions and concerns.”
“Three weeks ago, Lord Frost rejected the EU’s offer of a veterinary agreement, saying: “We are very ambitious about CPTPP membership… That is the problem.” Since we cannot ask Lord Frost himself, can the Minister perhaps tell us why the UK’s accession to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership is incompatible with reaching an agreement with Europe on food standards? From which of our current food standards do the Government wish to diverge?”
“As a devastating Equality and Human Rights Commission report highlighted some five years ago, and certainly given the experience of too many of my constituents, discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers is still widespread. When will the Government actually get their act together and bring in the legislation they have promised to stop employers making women redundant during pregnancy, and until at least six months after they have returned from maternity leave?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have received a number of representations from those seeking to find work on sites such as LinkedIn about not being able to see even a minimum salary that would be available to them were they to secure the position. The Employment Bill is obviously the right piece of legislation to raise these issues with Ministers, but as yet there appears to be no sign of it appearing. I wonder whether you have heard any evidence as to when it might emerge.”
“Q Thank you, Ms Ghani. I would like to take you back to the FCA’s handling of the consumers who phoned up the FCA about London Capital & Finance. Can you tell me whether there was ever a meeting between FCA officials and some of those customer investors—unsophisticated or sophisticated, depending on the language that the FCA might want to use? Was there ever an actual meeting that took place between FCA officials and those customers? Sheree Howard: Could I ask for clarification? Are you asking about during the time that LCF was in operation, or subsequently?”