Iggles v. Jobsworths
HERE'S a regulation that fails the Iggles test. (Iggles, you will remember, is the Lord Mayor's cat, foiled by regulations from liv- ing in the Mansion House.) It affects the millions of people who were encouraged to buy penny packets of shares in privatisation sales, and now find that when they want to sell, the proceeds are swallowed up in the broker's commission. This prompted the Daily Telegraph to arrange a cheap selling service for its readers, through brokers ShareLink. About 40,000 customers used it, two of whom grumbled about it. Now the Securities and Investments Board has stamped it out. Can't be done, says SIB not under the Financial Services Act. That Act constituted SIB as the investor's pro- tector-in-chief, but nothing is being protect- ed here except the profit-margins of ineffi- cient brokers and the employment on SIB's staff of more and more jobsworths. They are at their best on such issues. Their first intervention, when SIB was set up, was to stand between buyers of life assurance and pensions and terrible people like banks and building societies. The buyers, of course, were being ripped off, but not by building societies or banks, as SIB has at last noticed. Looking after investors? Sorry, but it's as much as my job's worth. I need hardly add that the new Deregulation Bill leaves this Act, or jobsworths' charter, alone.
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