Information on DP23/5 - advice guidance boundary review - January 2024

We have estimated the cost of work on the DP23/5 – Advice Guidance Boundary Review (AGBR) to be £373,464.

We do not however, hold a record of the estimated cost of work for ‘any previous consultation papers.’ This is because we did not have a fixed or determined number of people who only worked on the previous consultation papers i.e. CP22/24[1] and Financial Advice Market Review (FAMR)[2].

To calculate an estimate would require us to undertake a significant amount of analysis and reconciliation and would result in the FCA creating new information, which under FOIA we are not obliged to do.

While we know this may disappoint you, we are sorry we cannot carry out an exercise to identify the estimates you have requested.

We have currently received 1 non-confidential response which is attached at Annex A. We are expecting to receive more responses nearer to the feedback end period which is 28 February 2024.

We can confirm that we hold the information you are seeking and the list of stakeholder meetings on DP23/5 can be found in the below table:

We are, however, unable to disclose the minutes of the meetings that have taken place as we are of the view that making this information public at this stage would prejudice the exercise by the FCA of its regulatory functions under FSMA. The information is therefore exempt from disclosure under Section 31 (Law enforcement) of FOIA.

This exemption applies here, as disclosure would, harm our function of “ascertaining” or monitoring compliance with our regulatory requirements over time (as opposed to during an ongoing investigation).

Finally, we are prohibited from disclosing it to you as some of the information is confidential under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA). We are therefore exempted from the duty to disclose this information under section 44 of FOIA.

For a detailed explanation of why these exemptions apply, please see Annex B.

We do not hold the information you are seeking this is because, the DP23/5 is the first published paper on the AGBR and we are still at the initial stage of the review.

We will consider data such as the below when carrying out any analysis on the estimated number of advisors and consumers that can benefit from simplified advice and targeted support:     

• Based on FCA published data in 2023[3], the number of retail investment business firms is 5116;  
• The number of people receiving advice in 2022 was 4.4. million consumers (see page 6 of DP23/5[4]); and  
• Data in 2022 suggested that there were approximately 9.7m UK consumers have over £10,000 in investable assets and held these mostly or entirely in cash. Out of those, the number of consumers who have some appetite for investment risk is approximately 4.2m (see page 9 of CP22/24[5]).