The total levy proposed by the FCA for the next year is £481.6m, up 8.4% on the £446.4m from the current year.
The FCA also proposed to increase its minimum fees, paid by firms with an annual turnover of between £1,000 and £100,000, by 8.4% – from the current £1,000 to £1,084 ‘in line with the overall increase in the annual funding requirement’.
The regulator said £16m of the levy increase will fund additional FCA staff to deliver its “enhanced objectives” while £11m will be used to upgrade technology and information systems and to develop its new learning suite FCA Academy.
The Financial Ombudsman Service levy will be frozen at £23.3m, while £79.1m will go to the Money Advice Service (MAS).
Advisers are set to contribute £4.2m to the MAS levy, 16% more than in the current year, when it was £3.6m.
This is despite a proposed reallocation of 21% of funds from the MAS’ money advice provision, funded by advisers, to its debt service.
The MAS plans to allocate more money to funding its ‘increased activity related to that fee block’, the FCA said.
Chief executive Martin Wheatley (pictured) said: “These proposals seek to share the cost of being regulated and ensure the FCA has the right resources in place to deliver appropriate protection for consumers and make markets work well.”
Adviser fees for the current year were set at £68m – a near -19% reduction on the year before.
This was mainly as a result of a policy change, which sought to correct an ‘anomaly’ in the fees system that meant advisers with permissions to hold client money were sometimes paying less.
The regulator created a new fee block, A21, through which it began charging advisers who do control client money a fee for doing so, resulting in lower costs for the A13 group.
A review of the way the FCA allocates fees to firms was scrapped last June with the regulator citing a “lack of consensus” among stakeholders on viable alternatives.
The regulator first announced the review shortly after coming to power in April 2013 but delayed it repeatedly.
In its fees consultation paper in March the following year it then said it had taken into account the views of stakeholders and ‘decided that we should continue with the current overall approach’.
