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Financial Services Bill

My Lords, I am grateful for the contributions to this short debate and I note that the noble Baroness accepted with great generosity the government amendments, which were meant to be responsive to the points made by the Opposition and the anxieties they expressed. I heard her reservation about Amendment 59, but we do not need to interpret that as being unduly restrictive. After all, her noble friend from the Back Benches, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has emphasised how much the issue of financial education needs to be addressed with the greatest care. With Amendment 59, we are quite clearly insisting that the necessary relevance to the consumer financial education function is contained in the appointment. That seems to me to be absolutely right. We are dealing here with what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, accurately identified as an area that needs very great and considerable attention; he was buttressed by the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, particularly on pensions. We all appreciate greatly how much that issue has to be embedded in the public consciousness, so that short-term decisions on such long-term considerations can no longer be the basis on which anyone acts on the pensions position. We particularly all appreciate the extent to which personal and private provision will play such an important part in the future. I do not think that Amendment 59 does anything but specify what is absolutely necessary, but I am grateful to the noble Baroness for indicating that she will not oppose it on this occasion and that she accepts the other amendments in the spirit in which they were given—of contributing to a joint position on this part of the Bill. I very much appreciate the concern and, indeed, the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on this issue. He will forgive me if I chide him a little. At one moment, he was saying that it just will not do that we have the wrong phraseology in this title, while at the end he was saying that the important thing is that we must insist upon consumer confidence—which is exactly what we have expressed in the Title of the Bill. His own speech indicated that the extent of the interchange on the concepts of customer or consumer ought not to detain us a great deal. I feel that we may be dancing on the head of a pin here; after all, he says that there is no such thing as a short-term relationship for a customer. Well, I hate to say this but in one day’s travel on a train you are likely to hear the rail company referring to you as a customer. I recognise that you may be lucky if you have a short-term acquaintance there, as the journey is often more protracted than one had expected. Nevertheless, the noble Lord will recognise that these terms are close to being interchangeable, and not ones that ought to concern us in legislation.