Adair Turner spoke at the FSA’s Annual Public Meeting on 24 June 2010 reporting on the performance over the past year.
He mentioned that it is ‘very difficult in this meeting… …to produce indices of outcome in the latest year which measure our performance in any meaningful way’. The Annual Report’s focus is on an ‘imperfect’ link between activities and outcomes. Turner indicated how the FSA has changed over the past 3 years, with a previous approach to ‘regulation and supervision of product terms disclosure and of sales processes’, into a new belief that ‘the specific characteristics of retail financial services… …require a more interventionist approach.
‘The government has now decided’ to implement major structural change and Turner outlined his long belief of the dangers in the current structure. ‘If the new prudential approaches which we have now put in place are sound, the proof will be whether our banks and insurance companies avoid trouble in 2015 and 2020.’
