Speaking at the APFA annual dinner on Wednesday evening, Lord Deben, John Gummer, (pictured) said the regulator had placed too much emphasis on the advised sales process and had failed to act as a ‘gatekeeper’ to protect the industry from bad practitioners.
He told the audience: “We need a balance between the regulatory and the supervisory process.
“The FCA needs to focus on gatekeeping, approving only the right people, and for a scheme to work with the FCA to share information that bad advisers do not pop up again elsewhere.”
He added: “Our members feel most strongly that people who have been excluded for thoroughly bad practice, [don’t] then appear somewhere else down the road because they managed to get themselves in some other firm or some other set-up.
“We really do have to make sure that a professional body insists upon those professional standards being upheld and make sure that the system doesn’t allow individuals to make a monkey of it.”
Lord Deben also suggested the regulator needed to do more to understand the “brain of the business that we have”.
He said: “Sometimes one feels that those who are regulating have never sat behind the desk and talked to a normal person about the issues with which we are concerned.”
