You pay peanuts and you get... Legislators and Regulators!

I attended a really depressing conference last week.

The conference was about the effectiveness of UK financial regulations, with the main speaker being Andrew Tyrie, Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, ably supported by the likes of Angela Knight, Chair of the British Bankers Association.

Most of the conference was expended discussing the huge cost faced by Financial Services companies in meeting the massive number of regulations that are continuously being produced. The rest of the time was spent moaning about the (poor) quality of the Regulators.

Only two questions were taken from the audience and I was lucky enough to ask one of them. In a nutshell, my question was: “Given the terrible pay and lowly status we (UK PLC) inflict on Regulators – and Legislators – how can we expect to get good people in the roles?”

The gist of the response was;
* Regulators will always be poorly paid, so the best we (the UK public) can hope for is that very good people join the Regulator bodies to be trained. These employees will then hopefully give us a couple of years of fully-trained service, before moving on to better paid jobs at a Financial Services company.
* The pay of MPs doesn't really matter; those who aspire to be elected to Westminster care about other things than money.

I ACCEPT NEITHER OF THE ABOVE RESPONSES.

We need to pay Regulators and Legislators supremely well – and we need to accord them proper respect.

I would rather we recruited experienced Financial Services compliance professionals who know the sectors to be regulated inside-out. UK PLC needs to match their private-sector pay.

WHAT WE NEED FROM OUR REGULATORS IS EXPERIENCE AND JUDGEMENT, NOT BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS FRESH OUT OF OXBRIDGE.

With regards to our MPs, they need to be paid in line with senior private sector management roles. £100K+ per year is required. Then we can expect our MPs to get the experience of working for a living BEFORE entering Parliament. Life time politicos are too narrow to be our Legislators.

WE NEED TO SEE THE ABOVE CHANGES NOW. Moaning at conferences may get laughs from the audience but it achieves nothing.

UK PLC NEEDS – AND DESERVES – BETTER, STARTING WITH A HIGHER STANDARD OF REGULATORS AND LEGISLATORS.
 

Monday, 27th February 2012

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