Debate 1

Our first debate centres around a paper written by John Howard for Focus on Finance entitled Financial regulation: consumer safeguard or straitjacket.

In his paper Mr Howard argues that there won’t be a better time to make radical changes to the regulation of financial services, but the stability of the system is now a worldwide concern and may only have an international solution. He asks whether we can we expect international agreement to limit wild swings in global markets and, if not, can individual national regulators and governments still protect their own citizens?

In the UK we do have the tools to substantially reduce the mis-selling of financial products but this requires some important decisions to be made. Would it be right to ban the sale of more complex and risky financial products to consumers who might not be able to understand them? If a consumer plainly doesn’t understand what they are buying, should a salesperson refuse to sell it to them? If they do sell it to them, should the sales person be liable if it fails? Would it be feasible and desirable to create a suite of straightforward, simple and ‘safe’ products with no more than half a page of terms? If such a suite of products could be created, should we limit the banks and other High Street retailers to the sale of these ‘safe’ products? These are some of the questions our first debate will consider.

Download John Howard’s paper.

Download a summary of the first discussion event.

Download the podcast from the first debate (10MB mp3).

John Howard is a journalist and broadcaster with extensive experience of consumer issues having been the principal presenter of the daily consumer programme on Radio 4 'You and Yours' and numerous other financial programmes on radio and TV. He was appointed to the Financial Service Consumer Panel in October 2000 and served as its chair from 2005 until 2008.