Skilled Persons appointments 2017-2021 information – October 2021

In respect of Financial Conduct Authority ("FCA") Skilled Person ("SP") appointments, whether contracted by a firm or directly by the FCA, and whether or not on the FCA's SP Panel ("Appointments"), made only from 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2021:

(i)  The firm, business or trading name of each SP with one or more Appointments ("Appointed SPs").

(ii)  Separately for each Appointed SP, within each quarter of each FCA reporting year (and if you would refuse that request, then alternatively for each FCA reporting year) ("Reporting Period"):

      (a)  The number of Appointments made within that Reporting Period.

      (b)  The number of Appointments made within each Lot within that Reporting Period (and separately the number of Appointments not assigned to any Lot). Please include Appointments of SPs that are not on the FCA's SP Panel, where their Appointments are nevertheless assigned to a Lot including for the purpose of publishing on your website information on the number of SP reports.

      (c)  The total cost as at 31 March 2021 of the Appointments made within that Reporting Period. Here we seek the total cost of all of the Appointments of each SP, not the cost of each individual Appointment.

Point i)

The names of the skilled persons appointed broken down by year can be found in the Annex A Table 1 below.

Point ii)

We can confirm that we hold the requested information; however, we are prohibited from disclosing it to you. In particular, we are unable to disclose the number of appointments for each of the relevant skilled persons and the total costs of the appointments received by each skilled person. This is because these details constitute confidential information that the FCA has received in the course of carrying out its public function under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA).

Section 348 of FSMA prevents us from disclosing ‘confidential information’ we have received except in certain limited circumstances (none of which applies here).  Therefore, under section 44 (Prohibitions on disclosure) of FOIA we are exempted from the duty to disclose such confidential information.

Further details on why this exemption applies can be found in Annex B.

We can, however, confirm that the aggregate cost incurred by the relevant firms in relation to the reviews issued from 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2021 is £58.9m. Please note that this figure does not include costs for reviews that started prior to this period.

In addition, the total number of appointments broken down for each of the relevant years can be seen in Annex A Table 2 below.

Annex A

Table 1 – Details of skilled persons with one or more appointments (firms listed in alphabetical order).

Table 2 – Quarterly breakdown of Lot Allocations

Annex B

• Section 44 (Prohibitions on Disclosure)

Section 44(1)(a) of FOIA states that information is absolutely exempt from disclosure if this is prohibited by law.  Section 348 of FSMA restricts the FCA from disclosing ‘confidential information’ it has received in the course of carrying out its public function.  FSMA allows exceptions to this in a few specific circumstances, but none of these apply to this request.

Confidential information here is defined as non-public and non-anonymised information involving a person’s business or other affairs, which the FCA received in the course of carrying out its public function.

The information you requested is confidential information under this provision.  If we disclosed this information, without the provider’s consent and the consent of the person the information is about, we would be in breach of section 348 of FSMA.  This would be a criminal offence.

In many requests for information under FOIA we have to judge different factors to decide whether disclosing the requested information would be in the public interest or not.  For this request, we have an ‘absolute’ exemption against supplying the information, and so we do not need to make this kind of judgement.