The Treasury Committee has published its latest letter to the FCA and the FCA’s response on progress following the Sexism in the City enquiry and report.
The Committee asked the FCA for an update on progress generally, but also in specific areas including:
- whether the FCA has done any work on monitoring the removal of the bankers’ bonus cap;
- what supervisory actions resulted from the review of culture and non-financial misconduct in wholesale firms;
- how has the FCA made workplace culture a central element of its supervisory work; and
- how many cases is the FCA currently looking at and in what sectors.
The FCA’s response includes:
- an explanation of how the non-financial conduct rules have been extended to apply now also to non-banks, but that the FCA has not yet decided whether it needs to issue additional guidance – it plans to confirm before the end of the year whether it will do so;
- that it won’t yet monitor progress on the bonus cap removal as it recognises it takes time for firms to make changes;
- that it has carried out a survey on the use of NDAs and confidentiality agreements in cases of non-financial misconduct in wholesale firms, which showed these have fallen – but it doesn’t intend to make these surveys a regular practice;
- an explanation of how it is engaging with firms on its expectations and particularly with the outliers following its wholesale firm review;
- that is doesn’t have any current plans to survey any other sector;
- that the impact of the changes coming in from 1 September 2026 will require firms to report serious, substantiated cases of non-financial misconduct as breach of conduct rules and to mention them in regulatory references; and
- that it currently has 76 open cases spread across sectors, but with the most in wholesale sell-side and infrastructure, retail banks, insurance and consumer investments, and one enforcement case in relation to which it issued a Decision Notice in March which is under appeal with the Tribunal. Cases have increased over the past 3 years, and there have currently been 176 this calendar year to date.