Parliamentary Connections

Every year or so the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services has a dinner with the trades unions representing workers in the financial services sector. Although there is spread of unions and staff associations active in the sector, dominated by AMICUS, they work together under the banner of Alliance for Finance.
The dinner has the habit of turning into abit of a platform for a group of Labour peers to show off their trade union credentials and the latest dinner last week was a particularly bad example of this habit with many of the Alliance for Finance representatives left feeling they hadn't had much of a chance to get their point of view across because they had been listening to speeches from members of the group – rather the opposite of how these events are meant to work. That said, they did air their concerns on a few key issues.
Top of their list was the pressure that bank and building society counter staff and call centre workers are put under to reach sales targets that the unions frequently consider to be unrealistic. Representatives from right across the sector felt that many of these targets could only be reached if customers were over-sold – if not blatently mis-sold – financial products. They felt this was now especially true of some things that are not caught in the Financial Services Authority net, such as credit cards and other debt-related products.
Running neatly in parallel with this fear is their concern about the lack of consumer education on personal finance. The unions are very supportive of the drive to include this in the national curriculum and were mildy critical of the Financial Services Authoirty for not doing more on this front.
Both of these issues have been recurring themes when the All Party Group has met the unions over the years. Things maybe moving on the consumer education front but no real work has ever been done on looking at the contribution that overly aggressive sales targets have made to the various mis-selling scandals over the last 20 years. Perhaps the unions could consider funding a university department to carry out some research into this so that they can come back next year with some hard evidence to prove the point.

Fraud has been in the news this week following the release of the ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) report on The Nature, Extent and Economic Impact of Fraud.
This produced the headline grabbing figure of £20bn lost to fraud every year and brought home the impact of fraud – and the fear of fraud – is having on ordinary people. It is, the report made crystal clear, certainly not a "victimless crime" as often chracterised by police and Home Office in the past when pressed for a more focussed attack on fraud.
Earlier in the week, the chairman of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) spoke to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services and painted an equally grim picture about the extent of fraud. He admitted that even he found it hard to get the police engaged with the need to investigate fraud, although he was able to point to some examples of where police forces had worked with insurers to investigate insurance fraud.
The disappointing aspect to all of this is that there is little in the way of plans for concerted action. ACPO have called for the establishment of a National Fraud Reporting Centre (which is a recommendation the Home Office is looking at already) but all this can do is depress us further. We all know that the £20bn figure is an under-estimate, probably a serious under-estimate, but knowing for certain that the real figure is much higher doesn't seem to get us alot further forward.
What we need is some fresh calls for action to curtail fraud and catch the fraudsters as part of a fully fledged National Fraud Strategy. This requires a whole raft of measures: more funding for Fraud Squads, the designation of one or two police forces to take the lead nationally on fraud (the City of London Police already does some of that) and the creation of targets for catching fraudsters and eliminating fraud.
The government is committed to publishing its response to the consultations to the Fraud Review published last year on Thursday next week (15 March). Is it too optimistic to hope for some real, tough measures to be proposed as part of that?

The vote by the House of Commons for a 100% elected House of Lords came as a complete surprise to most commentators as well as the majority of the cabinet. Tony Blair showed just how far out of touch he is with the prevailing mood by voting for the 50% appointed/50% elected House of Lords – the option that was defeated by the biggest majority.
I can't see the 100% elected option getting much further, however. A significant number of MPs who voted for it actually don't support radical reform of the Lords. They voted for this option because they think that it has little chance of progressing, playing just the sort of political games that most of the public don't understand and certainly don't like. There was, however, a real majority for the option of having an 80% elected House of Lords and this would seem to be where we are heading.
There are still big issues to be addressed, not least getting the ermine clad turkeys to vote for Christmas. Also high up the agenda must be the size of the reformed House and its role: these already seem to be getting lost in a largely irrelevant debate about what is should be called. Just as with the House of Commons (see below), we should first look at the functions of the new upper house and then properly analyse how many people are needed to carry out those functions effectively.
As to the key question: should there be any appointed members? I think that 20% is about right so long as it is kept away from the Prime Minister of the day. We need to create a system where people who would never stand for election but who can make a major contribution to the legislative process can be appointed for a fixed term.