The Treasury has concluded its Future Regulatory Framework (FRF) Review, which aimed to ensure the UK’s regulatory framework for financial services continues to be coherent, agile, and internationally respected.
On 9 December 2022, the Treasury published its Policy Statement on Building a smarter financial services framework for the UK. Together with the Government and the other financial services regulators, we will be implementing the outcomes of the FRF Review. Delivering these outcomes is a key part of our public commitments. We explain our approach and how we are delivering these. We will keep these pages updated.
See our approach to FRF implementation
About the FRF review
Post-Brexit, the FRF Review aimed to ensure the UK’s financial services sector can have tailored rules to best suit UK markets.
The outcomes of the Review cover changes that:
- add to our objectives and regulatory principles
- build on our existing accountability arrangements, enhance scrutiny of our activities, and strengthen stakeholder engagement
- give powers to the Treasury and the financial services regulators to create a framework where the expert and independent regulators have greater responsibility for setting regulatory requirements that apply to firms
The draft legislation that will enable us to implement the outcomes of the FRF Review is in the Financial Services and Markets Bill. Once the Bill becomes law, the regulatory framework will change. The Treasury and the financial services regulators will then start to move firm-facing requirements from legislation into their rulebooks. In practice, this means the Treasury repealing retained EU law and replacing it with an appropriate UK framework, under which the financial services regulators will make detailed, firm-facing requirements in their rulebooks.
Our FRF work and delivering on our commitments
We have set out our approach to the FRF Review and delivering the measures, and our proposed future approach to implementation.
‘Preparing financial services for the future’ is one of our key strategic commitments in our Strategy and Business Plan. Implementing the FRF Review reforms is a key part of that commitment. It is also an important step for much of the policy in our ‘Strengthening the UK’s position in global wholesale markets’ commitment.
Focusing our FRF efforts
Our Business Plan 2022/23 and our 3-year Strategy (2022 to 2025) set out our key areas of focus and how we will monitor progress.
Our FRF implementation work (‘preparing financial services for the future’) forms part of our overall commitment to ‘promoting competition and positive change’.
Outcomes we want to achieve
We want to ensure our implementation of the FRF Review reforms support all the FCA’s top-line outcomes and that it creates confidence in financial markets.
We can achieve this by ensuring the orderly transfer of responsibility for firm-facing requirements to the FCA. We will continue to work with the Treasury to deliver the transfer, including helping it prepare any legislation needed to deliver the new framework.
We will also continue preparing to implement the other FRF changes. For example, changes to our duties, accountability arrangements and wider responsibilities, which include the secondary international competitiveness and growth objective and the new processes around our rule-making and cost benefit analyses.
Feedback
We welcome feedback on our implementation plans through [email protected]. Please explicitly state whether your feedback is confidential.