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Financial Services Bill

My Lords, as my last intervention indicated, I regret the removal of substantial parts of this Bill which would have favoured consumers. I am hoping that similar unanimity between the Front Benches will at least agree that we should restore some small elements of greater protection for consumers in the three amendments in this group. They deal with two different issues. The first one deals with the rate of interest on credit cards, which was covered by a consultation, conducted recently by BIS, in which the Government indicated their intention to do exactly what Amendment 301 proposes. At the moment, if you have a credit card due to be paid off monthly and you do not pay off the full amount at the end of the month, the debts that are removed are those with the lowest rate of interest—in other words, the highest rate of interest remains due in subsequent months and thereafter. The new clause is intended to reverse that and to require that where such a situation applies, the card holder will benefit from the amount with the highest interest rate being regarded as that being repaid on the outstanding balance. The Government have been sympathetic to that in the past, and I hope that the House will therefore be sympathetic to the amendment. If my noble friend cannot agree to it in the Bill, at least perhaps he—and, perhaps, Opposition spokespeople—could indicate support for it appearing in secondary legislation or a lending code, as the present situation is certainly a serious abuse of consumers. The other two amendments relate to a wider issue, which is the way in which the FSA conducts its regulation. Most regulators, when they are investigating a company, put its name into the public arena. They indicate that there are issues with the company, so customers are at least warned that a company is being looked at, until the end of the investigation. That is not the case for the FSA. In fact, the FSA is required not so to do. Those two amendments would partially alter that: it would not be a full-scale naming and shaming exercise; only where the FSA's judgment was that it was in the interests of its consumer protection objective would the name of an investigated company be in the public arena. There would therefore be a pretty substantial hurdle before that happened. The first amendment would allow the FSA to disclose any information that it finds in the course of its supervisory work, provided that it is in the interests of the consumer protection objective to disclose it. The second relates specifically to the point where the FSA issues a warning notice. At that point, almost all regulators put the name of the firm concerned into the public arena. The firm will already have gone through substantial investigation by that point. I hope that the Government will be prepared to consider and accept those amendments, which go some way to ensuring that the public understand in detail how the FSA is conducting its regulatory function. I beg to move.