With such wide industry support, this could have played a major part in raising standards over the next few years.
I don’t propose to labour the point about why this was such an important development, but let’s not lose sight of exactly why we wanted this: it would have helped to raise the reputation of advisers and of the whole industry and it would have made it made it easier for customers and everyone in the industry to know who they could and should be dealing with.
The cost to the industry of not having a central register of brokers is immense with a huge amount of duplication with individual broker firms, different networks and lenders all having to carry out the varying checks over and over again.
So what do we do now? It looks as if the original proposed solution is still some years away. There has been some suggestion that perhaps the industry should build its own register, although it is not clear how this would work. Given that this would take time to agree, design and build – and then be potentially obsolete when the FCA delivers its long term solution – there would seem to be a fairly short term benefit (if any) to this approach.
In the meantime, our focus will be on working closely with lenders and insurers to support the ongoing raising of standards. This means ensuring all parties adopting an open and constructive partnership approach designed to identify and address any undesirable behaviour. Between us, we can still make a significant difference, despite the delay, but it is still a shame the industry will be doing this without this key part of the plan.
By Jon Round, chief executive of First Complete
