Lucy HadrillThe FCA has responded to a letter before claim under the pre-action protocol for judicial review from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Business Banking (APPG).
APPG’s letter before claim refers to the decision made by FCA on 30 September 2021 not to seek to use its powers to require further redress to be paid to interest rate hedging products (IRHP) customers. The APPG considers this decision to be unlawful, irrational and/or to have involved procedural impropriety and therefore wants to challenge it by judicial review. The APPG’s letter also takes the conclusions of the Swift report, published at the end of last year, into account.
In response, the FCA says that the decision was reasonable and rational and was supported by compelling reasons. The FCA’s view is that the steps taken in 2012 and 2013 to address concerns about IRHP misselling between 2001 and 2011 secured an appropriate degree of protection for customers who were missold such products. The FCA says that the APPG’s grounds do not present a challenge to its 2021 decision but are in fact a challenge to the decisions FCA took in 2012 and 2013. The FCA considers it is now too late to revisit these decisions via judicial review and says that any such claim will be “firmly resisted”.
