Restore Britain has unveiled a plan to abolish the FCA and the PRA in their current form.

In a new policy paper published yesterday, co-authored by Rupert Lowe and financial services expert Stephen Cooper, Restore Britain argued that successive waves of regulation since the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 have crushed risk-taking, driven growth companies overseas, and left London’s capital markets a shadow of their former selves.

Restore Britain said it would replace the current regulators with industry self-governance and common law, with the Bank of England taking sole responsibility for overseeing the banking system as it did before.

The paper traces the decline to Gordon Brown’s first Budget in July 1997, which it said “penalised pension funds for investing in British companies, and the creation of a sprawling unchecked, obstructive, regulatory apparatus that now costs the financial services industry over £1.1bn a year in fees alone”.

Rupert Lowe, leader of Restore Britain, said: "When I started work in the City of London in 1979, London was Europe's and arguably the world's pre-eminent centre for risk-taking and financial innovation. Today a labyrinth of laws, regulations and bureaucracy has crushed that spirit. The decline of high finance in the country that invented it was a political choice made over decades. Restore Britain intends to reverse it."

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