PS25/5: Our Enforcement Guide and greater transparency of our enforcement investigations

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What we are changing

We are streamlining, focusing and updating our Enforcement Guide and making changes to our publicity policy to achieve greater transparency of our enforcement investigations.

The updated Enforcement Guide will be a more user-friendly document that benefits firms and consumers.

Who this is for

This Policy Statement and our revised Enforcement Guide may be of interest to:

• Firms that fall within our regulatory oversight, whether authorised by or registered with us, carrying out designated activities or relevant securities issuers.
• Firms conducting activities for which they should be authorised or registered but are not.
• Individuals working in either type of firm.
• Consumer and investor groups and individual consumers and investors.
• Industry groups, trade bodies, advisers, experts and commentators.
• Other regulatory bodies.

Next steps

Our streamlined and updated Enforcement Guide will make it easier for firms and advisers to access key information.

We will assess the impact of the revised Enforcement Guide, and public and industry confidence in our enforcement work. We will also proactively monitor other relevant data and stakeholder feedback we receive.

Background

The UK has a globally competitive financial services sector which plays an important part in supporting economic growth. High standards of market integrity, underpinned by effective regulation and enforcement, are critical to that effort. Our enforcement work directly reduces the damage that fraud and financial crime cause to UK markets’ international reputation, growth and competitiveness.

We recognised that our average investigation times were too long. We have focused our portfolio of enforcement cases in line with our strategic priorities and significantly accelerated our investigations. 

We first published our Enforcement Guide in 2007, and it has since grown significantly. We consulted on proposed measures to update and streamline our Enforcement Guide and increase transparency in CP24/2 and CP24/2: Part 2.

Our consultation included proposals for a new investigation publicity policy to provide a measured increase in transparency under a ‘public interest’ test. Following feedback to our consultation, we revised these proposals and limited the resulting policy changes. We have kept the ‘exceptional circumstances’ test in our existing investigation publicity policy for regulated firms.

We have implemented most of the other changes on which we consulted.