Revealed: The FCA's hidden thoughts on P2P

At para 655 the tribunal considered a passage in a P2P paper dated April 2017:

“‘The problem at present appears to be that current viability, threshold, disclosure, client money and other tools only scratch the surface of such issues without getting rid of the underlying harm or detriment.’”



At para 658 the Judgment reports that:

“Ms Frohn [Risk Director] accepted that the Claimant was identifying not only potential, but also actual, breaches of the FCA’s statutory objectives.”



And at para 659:

“Ms Frohn accepted, and we find, that the authors of the paper were saying that, by maintaining the status quo, the FCA was in breach of the statutory objective of consumer protection.”

And at 660:
"we are satisfied that the Claimant subjectively believed that the information he (and others) was disclosing tended to show that the FCA was in likely or actual breach of its statutory objectives. That belief was reasonable: the Claimant was himself a specialist in this field; other specialists, including Mr Barnes, agreed with the Claimant’s position; Ms Frohn herself, in an email to Mr Bailey of 7 June 2017, suggested that the regulatory regime currently in place was no longer fit for purpose and needed revisiting."