Mortgage News
FSPP: FSA needs better staff and tailored industry knowledge
A survey out today underlines the industry’s discontent with the regulator with critics suggesting the FSA needs to tailor its treatment of individual firms, reduce regulatory cost and simplify its rules among a raft of other changes.
Stricter supervision of banks was another priority, felt respondents, alongside improving the quality of FSA staff. Regulatory cost reduction, protecting consumers dealing with financial crime and improving consumer confidence in the financial sector were also all earmarked as key areas for the regulator to work on.
The sixth Financial Services Practitioner’s Panel (FSPP) survey revealed smaller financial firms reported higher levels of dissatisfaction with the regulator than larger firms, which it felt was largely the result of “more at arms length regulation.”
High FSA staff turnover was yet another criticism levied at the regulator, as was inexperience.
An FSA spokesperson said: “Our last statistics out in October 2010 showed the average one-year staff turnover at about 9.5%, against a financial services average of 15%, so it’s substantially lower than average. We do try to establish continuity, however, and this is something we are very aware of.”
She added: “In terms of depth of knowledge of our employees, the FSA has focused on this issue for the last three years. It has been successful. Training and competence assessments have been introduced for all supervisors and there are other measures in train. This is a work in progress.
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“I think firms can see and have registered the changes and this is in part a reaction to that. The last time we asked for a similar survey was before the collapse of Northern Rock. This is a completely different landscape.”
All the feedback would be taken into account and would inform the new regulatory structure, she said.
The survey revealed a feeling of “anger” about the crisis and the fact it had been allowed to happen at all, but respondents still fear an overly heavy-handed response.
Ray Boulger, senior technical manager at John Charcol, said he has always blamed the Labour government of the time for failing to set the line.
“The danger is that that the regulator will bring in rules to deal with yesterday’ s problems, but by the time they’re implemented, we’ll have a whole new set of issues to deal with,” said Boulger.