Insurance Post

All Party Group chair puts FSCS reform case - but where are the IFAs?

The debate over the future of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme took another step forward last night - at least from the intermediary perspective - when Jonathan Evans, Conservative MP for Cardiff North - presented a 7000 signature petition to Parliament.

The petition was organised by the British Insurance Brokers' Association and calls on the Financial Services Authority to get on with the delayed review of the FSCS and to take note of the excessive burdens currently falling on smaller brokers. It repeats the familiar call for them to be separated from other classes of firms the scheme currently throws them in with. Mr Evans is also chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services and will this afternoon be chairing a meeting of that group when it will hear from Sheila Nicoll, the FSA's Director of Conduct Policy on The Future and Funding of the FSCS.

While I applaud the effective campaign that BIBA has run on this topic, I am left wondering why there hasn't been more common cause made with the independent financial advisers who have exactly the same issues with the FSCS as insurance brokers? We know from the debates in the Commons on the Retail Distribution Review just before Christmas that small IFAs are a powerful lobby and have alot of supporters, especially among newer MPs. A joint petition would have the potential to make an even greater impact, not merely because it would have garnered even more signatures but because it would have shown common cause across different parts of the market diluting the inevitable accusations of special pleading by one sector.

There remains, of course, plenty of time and scope for linking up with IFAs and taking the campaign up another notch but perhaps we should see what the FSA has to say this afternoon first.

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