The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Personal Banking and Fairer Financial Services (members) has just published some testimonies about the FCA as part of its call for evidence about the FCA.
This testimony from an anonymous FCA employee is particularly striking (though to me, as a previous FSA staffer, not surprising.
Overall, a negative and depressing time in working at the FCA. The FCA has developed a toxic culture and spends huge resources, time and effort on self-protection, of itself, at the expense of supporting consumers. The FCA appears to operate in a malicious and vindictive way and is not willing to accept any kind of constructive criticism from staff. The FCA is a wasting money and staff effort on self-protection which is quite sickening when set against the context of its failures in recent years to regulate firms properly. Based on the evidence I have seen, the FCA is simply not doing its job and has become a failing, bloated, defensive organisation – with most of its efforts and resources going on self-promotion and trying to counter the many criticisms of it.
Quite. The whole unstated purpose of a regulator is to protect itself. When I worked there, you had to suffer all these ridiculous initiatives about ‘learn and change’, ‘vision and values’, ‘making a real difference’ and (at the Bank) ’20 20 vision’, which come across as noble and visionary but really translate to “keep the gravy train running, and don’t get caught for mistakes, even if that means doing nothing much of the time”.
There needs to be strong scrutiny of this absurd organisation, but who has the patience (and the competence) to do it?