Speeches by Glen.

“Just very quickly on process. Pre-Budget, you would not normally expect to speak to Treasury Ministers, would you? Was the way the run-up to the Budget was conducted unusual?”

“What is the average age of farmers? Is it mid-60s?”

“Will the NFU Mutual and others not provide financial instruments to many earlier on to make mitigations so they can plan?”

“Could I ask my last question, Chair, and could I turn this to Jeremy and Stuart? Obviously, Jeremy, you have a career of experience in terms of advice and analysis of the rural economy. Surely most savvy farmers can find ways of mitigating the full extent of this. Is there not a lot of unnecessary concern? How do you r…”

“Can I probe a little more in terms of the net effect? David, perhaps we will come to you in a second, but your boss, Paul Johnson, who I have done some media with, is totally relaxed about this change. He sees it as a clear loophole. But one of the things that is vexing for the farming industry is the interaction with …”

“Why do you think that would not have been looked at? Because it would clearly have saved the Government lots of challenges presentationally.”

“Could I ask you about business rollover relief? There is a wide consensus that people who sell businesses to defer capital gains tax by buying large tracts of land are who most people feel should be dealt with. Could it not have been more effective and more targeted to use business rollover relief to tackle those peopl…”

“Can I ask about the net effect? If we look at the OBR on page 70, table 3.8 it says, “There are a whole list of measures with high or very high uncertainty.” Obviously, we understand that farmers and those who advise farmers will be able to put mitigations to some extent depending on age, the family structure and so on…”

“Robert, do you agree with Tom’s assessment?”

“For the wider benefit, would you like to explain that the PRIIPs regime was deficient in that it was a set of rules nobody used obligating firms to produce key information documents that nobody found meaningful?”

“That is all right up to a point. You are the longest-serving chief executive of the FCA. You have gone through a massive transformation programme where you are trying to empower decision making further down the organisation. You must have an instinct. We as politicians want you to succeed and we want the economy and th…”

“Could I just follow up on that question, Mr Rathi? You have helpfully explained how this area of regulation came under your purview, essentially. This goes to a more fundamental question about Governments, as with funeral plans in my time, giving you another responsibility, at least to the point where you have 4,800 or…”

“Is there not an asymmetry between the new firms and the old firms? How do you get the regulation right? Some of the fintechs would say they have better systems that do not necessitate the same degree of regulation as some of the older firms and there is a tension between them. How do you reconcile that?”

“That is helpful. I have one final question, Chair, back to Mr Rathi. In terms of the way that the FCA operates in the approval of firms, you talked in your opening remarks about authorisation and associated risks. If we take another model, we are always trying to find out where, internationally, we should look. Br…”

“Yes.”

“Or what is in between.”

“Thank you very much, Chair. Can I focus on the risk trade-off, if you want to characterise it as that? One of the big challenges in the Mansion House speech was when the Chancellor spoke about the post-financial crisis tendency to develop a system that has tried to eliminate risk taking. Do you agree that that is what …”

“We did.”

“To examine one of those that happened on my watch with London Capital & Finance, there was a situation where there was a—”

“I was the Economic Secretary for four and a half years. Therefore, we had a lot of interaction—me as a Treasury Minister—with the FCA. That was a situation where there was a market failure. It was deemed to be partly the responsibility of the FCA to have stopped that from happening. What happened was that there was an …”