The former head of the Financial Conduct Authority has been accused of falling asleep during a meeting to discuss a pensions mis-selling scandal involving thousands of British Steel workers.
Andrew Bailey, 62, who left the City regulator last year to become governor of the Bank of England, nodded off a number of times during a meeting with representatives of steelworkers in September 2019, according to two people present at the meeting.
Philippa Hann, a solicitor at Clarke Willmott who advises steelworkers and was at the meeting, where there were said to be five people in total, said: “It must have happened 10 or 12 times and didn’t seem like he was listening. It appeared that he had briefly fallen asleep.”
Al Rush, a financial adviser who was at the meeting, said: “The meeting was an hour long, it was mid-afternoon on a Friday and it was a warm day . . . I was nonplussed because as I was talking he just went to sleep.” The incident was first reported by the Financial Times.
A report by the National Audit Office published yesterday found that the regulated financial advice market “failed to protect” thousands of steelworkers in Port Talbot. Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the Commons public accounts committee, said the authority had been “asleep at the wheel”.
Advertisement
The scandal dates back to 2017 when a restructuring of the British Steel pension scheme by Tata Steel gave 44,000 members the choice to transfer out completely. While this was a bad idea in most cases because the pension scheme offered guaranteed pensions regardless of stock-market performance, almost 8,000 members were advised to take that option. Transfer values averaged £365,000 and some were more than £1 million.
Advisers were usually only rewarded if the client transferred out. Of the 369 advisory firms involved, most were too small to be closely supervised by the watchdog. Victims missed out on £18 million worth of compensation.
A spokesman for Bailey said he had “devoted a huge amount of time” to the British Steel pension scheme and “he wholly and categorically rejects any suggestion that he did not take seriously the issues raised by those affected”.
A spokeswoman for the FCA said: “We continue to work to ensure that former British Steel pension scheme members who lost out financially due to poor advice receive compensation.”
