COMPANIES The Financial Services Authority’s efforts to strengthen its supervisory and enforcement work by recruiting hundreds more staff have been thrown off course by the Conservative party’s plan to disband the regulator. Since George Osborne, shadow chancellor, said last month he would shift the FSA’s core supervisory role to a beefed-up Bank of England, and set up a Consumer Protection Agency to handle the rest of the body’s work, the regulator has suffered a crisis of confidence affecting some top staff and potential recruits, according to headhunters, consultants and FSA insiders.
The disruption comes at an unfortunate time for the regulator, which has spent recent months seeking to recruit 280 extra staff in its supervisory division, boosting it by a third, as it gears up to implement the review of regulation published in the spring by the body’s chairman, Lord Turner.
