Richard Samuel - Tools for changing banking culture: FCA are you listening? Why the FCA’s IRHP mass dispute resolution system has failed and what the FCA can do about it

The mass dispute resolution system that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) set up in 2013 for customers of banks who had been mis-sold swaps has closed amid much criticism. It is currently the subject of judicial review proceedings and the FCA’s own internal review.

This article takes the opportunity to suggest to the FCA a new mass redress system of general application that would rapidly establish a publicly accessible body of authority on how the FCA’s Handbook rights and duties are to be applied in practice. Such a system would further the FCA’s overriding objective in creating the Handbook rights: achieving culture change in banking.

The suggested approach is modelled on the Employment Tribunal system, which was the forum within which the new statutory rights not to be unfairly dismissed and not to be discriminated on the grounds of sex or race were worked out, in real cases, from the 1960s onwards. In a very short while, that combination of new rights and a claimant-friendly forum had profoundly changed not just employment culture, but civil society as whole.

Capital Markets Law Journal (Volume 11, Issue 2)