The Practitioner Panel, established in November 1998, was designed to comprise senior figures from a cross-section of the financial services industry to ensure the FSA takes account of the views and concerns of regulated firms.
While mortgage brokers are represented through the FSA’s Small Business Practitioner Panel (SBPP), there are fears that intermediaries are being overlooked through the regulator’s main panel, where representatives are mainly figures from large lenders and insurers.
The FSA has recently appointed two new members to the Practitioner Panel; Nick Prettejohn, chief executive of Lloyd’s and Ruthven Gemmell, partner at Edinburgh law firm Murray Beith Murray.
Stephen Atkins, managing director of Freedom Finance and SBPP panel member, said: “I basically represent UK mortgage intermediaries on the FSA’s small practitioner panel.
“But there is a strong argument that a large mortgage body, like Sesame, should be included on the main practitioner board to represent the views of brokers now that mortgage regulation is coming into effect.”
Andy Young, product manager for mortgages at Sesame, commented: “From our perspective it would be good to have more representation on the panel for brokers. If we were invited to become a panel member, we would consider it.”
A spokesman at the FSA said the Practitioner Panel’s constituency is very broad and that to have all individual sectors represented would make the panel too big and unwieldy.
