Caveat emptor, “buyer beware”, no longer applies. In turn, entrepreneurs no longer take their firms to float on the stock market because liquidity has dried up as investors are discouraged from taking risk by agents who fear regulatory intervention.
The recent Consumer Duty initiative by the FCA was yet another step in the wrong direction, adding a further layer of repetitive bureaucratic obstruction, instructing agents on how to treat their clients and counterparties.
The end consumer may not always be the client in an agency transaction. He or she may be the counterparty, as could be the case in the motor finance example. The FCA’s Consumer Duty rules create circumstances where the consumer is not the agent’s client but is still owed a duty of care by the agent.
As we know from domestic property transactions, we expect an estate agent to act in the interest of the vendor. In financial services, that equivalent expectation is muddled by the FCA, which is asking agents to act also in the best interests of the purchaser/the counterparty.
This creates a conflict of interest that regulated agents are obliged to avoid under the FCA’s Principles for Businesses. When regulators with little business experience hardwire confusion into business life, it is exasperating for practitioners and immensely damaging for financial services in the UK.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there, with large firms employing senior staff without “skin in the game” to conform to overbearing regulation as a priority that takes precedence over growing their businesses. The recent debanking scandal at NatWest was an example of this.
Wealth creation needs long-term investment and motivated risk-takers. Central planning has never worked as a means of driving prosperity, and favours those good at manipulating committees rather than getting things done.
It always ends in failure, as will Labour’s belief in more state intervention. Entrepreneurs are bailing out of Britain in huge numbers. About 9,500 millionaires are forecast to leave the UK in 2024, more than double the 4,200 who left in 2023.
So when, just days after Labour entering power, we hear that the FCA plans a massive overhaul of the listing rules to alleviate regulatory obstructions to entrepreneurs wishing to use the London capital markets and make the LSE internationally competitive again, this is only half the story.
Regulation has strangled caveat emptor and the essential risk-taking that grows an economy by obstructing investors, which is a big factor in the demise of the capitalisation of the LSE to its current pathetic value.
It has become an overly complex charter for enriching the legal profession rather than securing long-term business investment which creates wealth and employment.
And Labour looks poised to push us further down the road to serfdom.
Rupert Lowe MP is Reform UK’s business spokesman