MAS to spend £20m on consumer awareness campaign

Totally out of control!

How can an unchanged fee be out of control?

Oink

Sheesh, a lot of nest feathering going on .........plus lots of whatever springs to mind, never mind the FS in the UK have deep pockets.

In these times of austerity an increase of 15.6% is staggering, should it not be a reduction of 15.6%.

Job creation Programme. soon they will outnumber the people that they regulate and will wonder why there is not profession to regulate any longer and why they are all being made redundant!!! Quid Pro Quo!!!

@ Morwenna - absolutely right. They think they are an entity in themselves unfortunately. How can the MAS cost that much money? This is a much larger issue than Stephen Hester's bonus and is a real scandal.

My wife says my funding requirement has increased by more than the FSA's 15.6%. Think I'll send out levy charges to my clients and see what they say.

Repeatable responses will be posted on this site - but don't hold your breath - my clients have a choice!!!!

It's true I shouldn't moan as my fees seem to have dropped by two thirds over the last few years. (along with my commission, my self esteem, and my ability to look after clients in the way we used to). But, I have to say, they seem to be bleeding the golden goose remorselessly. For goodness sake, don't let Nicolas Sarkozy hear about this - makes 0.1% seem like chicken feed

@ Paul Bernard : you have absolutely hit the nail on the head, it IS a scandal and far worse than the mere £1m figure bandied about for Stephen Hester / RBS.

ok heres the rub. The cost of the moneyadvice service has gone through the roof. It states on the 1st page of the site free impartial advice. Then in its T & C it says its not regulated and cannot make recommendations. Excuse me, but that is not "clear, fair and not misleading". So why bother spending £86 million of our money on this. They could have used this for lead generation for us. After all I beleive we are effectively their customer. Without us there would be no funding!!

Morwenna has put I think the view of many IFAs. Any more for the exit door ? Just think how many more hospital wards or libraries we could keep open with that 15% extra ? Where's the austerity in financial regulation ? Why has it escaped the cutbacks on roads, police, education, etc., etc. ?

Pass this to Mr Cameron. i bet Turner, Sants and co have had big shunks into their pensions and bonuses.

This is an absolute disgrace....MAS funding doubling over the next 2 years!! The MAS adverts sicken me every time i see them. There is no doubt in my mind that MAS is there as an alternative to seeking advice and the sadistic thing is the fact that we are paying for it!!! We pay them to take food off our table! Incredible

This is truly taxation without representation.

£86.8m to MAS for which the advisory sector obtains a double negative impact. Not only is it intended to be negative about professional advisers, but it also encourages the concept of free advice.

£32.5m for restructuring? Moving offices around and calling themselves something else. Money for old rope.

30% of the budget going to updating the IT structure? In any normal business would this not have been an ongoing procedural and budgetary process. Now they need a one off supplement?

Quite right, Nick. The organisation is totally out of control, especially after last years rise of 10%.

And what effect will adverse comment have. None. The FSA obviously don't have as much sensitively to comment as that absolutely terrible banker Stephen Hester! Just who has integrity?

MAS alone at £86.8m??? With only 80 staff? What the hell are they going to doing with that sort of budget? I thought they'd made a lot of staff redundant last year? Oh, sorry - I forgot....of course, it's to pay the Chief Exec. Silly me......

Absolutely disgraceful, all of it. When, oh when, will this funding system be revamped to something near fair?

@ Roy Rutter

Because the bill is paid by the financial services industry, not the general taxpayer and so does not affect Osborne's budget deficit. Brown, Balls and Millionaireband have spent the last three years blaming the financial services industry for the crash (and smearing anyone who dares to point out the truth as being "in the pocket of the City") so no-one sympathises

Come on Chaps! The pension hole needs filling. We must think of these people come retirement. After all, the rest of us may well rely on them for gardening jobs, sweeping and cleaning and crumbs from their table.

Morwenna, you are correct. Look at the MOD. Their personnel outnumber those they are suppopsed to be serving.

Sic transit gloria.

"Currently 42% of the FSA’s authorised firms need only pay the FSA minimum fee and for the third year running the gross minimum fee for firms will remain unchanged at £1,000." Where and who are the 42% that should be applauding the FSA? ;)

Additionally, anyone who commented on the growth of the FSA in terms of staffing levels, "It said it would achieve this by capping staff levels for the second year in a row". It's towards the end of the article for those that decided not to read the second page...

Before you start throwing more money at something is it not best to see how it goes and in the case of MAS, how many people actually use the sight and specifically benefit from the 'advice' given.

If I ran my business in the same manner I would have gone bust many years ago chucking money at every good idea I thought I had!

By the way which is not really a lot!

£40.5m for "coordinating" debt advice? What the hell does "coordinating" mean? Apart from the very small proportion of bad advice along the lines of increasing mortgage borrowing to fund speculative investments (which is covered anyway within the existing system) and possibly excessive mortgage borrowing (now largely a thing of the past), in what way is the regulated element of the FS industry remotely responsible for people getting into excessive debt?

Excessive debt appears to centre primarily on credit and store card borrowing, which is all but totally unregulated (though, as I have proposed numerous times in the past, card borrowing limits most certainly should be regulated). Why should the regulated element of the FS industry be forced to pay for advice to people who've run up excessive debts as a result of irresponsible borrowing practices that are nothing to do with us?

A quick Google search on debt advice reveals a whole slew of organisations offering FREE debt counselling, not least http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/ManagingDebt/PlanYourWayOutOfDebt/DG_187500. On what basis does the MAS consider it remotely justifiable to charge the FSA industry £40.5m provide yet another debt advice service on top of all those that already exist? There's the problem, of course ~ the FSA doesn't have to justify anything to anybody other than "its own board" and the government has already announced that the FCA will enjoy exactly the same total freedom from accountability. As head of the TSC, Andrew Tyrie can huff and puff for all he's worth but the bottom line is that Sants & Co can just thumb their noses at him, as indeed he all but did last March.

And where's the Cost:Benefit Analysis for this huge increase? MIA, as usual, as seems now to have become standard operational practice for the FSA and all its subsidiaries, despite claims on fsa.gov.uk that all new regulatory initiatives are subject to prior Cost:Benefit Analysis and consultation ~ consultation? What a pigging joke the FSA's idea of that is.

In fact, the funding of the whole MAS quango is a complete (extremely bad) joke. First of all it extorts £43m from the industry for its first year operating budget then, five minutes later, we read that it's dumping half its staff because there isn't enough for them to do. NOW we read that it's going to be INCREASING its budget for "delivering money advice" to £46.3 million (a bigger budget for half the number of original staff and, by implication, half the workload?) and adding a further £40.5m to provide advice on debt that's nothing to do with most of the FS industry and for which a host of agencies ALREADY exist providing free advice in this very area.

You couldn't make it up. It's just RIPPING OFF the industry and doing so at a time when the industry, in particular the IFA sector of it, is least able to afford any more levies for anything. Yet Hector Sants would have us believe that the FSA has no prejudicial agenda against the IFA community. The FSA's actions tell a VERY different story. The FS industry is no longer a golden goose. Rather, it's now a very badly sick and ailing goose.

What will you say to consumers, Mr Sants, when half the IFA community has thrown in the towel (or gone bust) and most consumers can't afford the fees that the remaining half will need to charge to meet all these excessive levies, the FSA's £30m bonus pot (despite your recent, decidedly less than flattering comments on the quality of a significant proportion of your staff) and our ever-escalating PII premiums, not to mention our profit-crushing workload for every piece of advice we give as a result of the FSA regulating everything by hindsight because it routinely fails to do its job properly in the first place?

It's been quite an effort to compose this post without including a few choice swear words. Add your own as you see fit.

Oh yes ~ as for the £20m to be spent on a new consumer awareness campaign, this another vile joke. First the MAS spent £4m+ on a TV ad campaign that's flopped so NOW, with no Cost:Benefit Analysis, it's going to spend almost FIVE TIMES that sum in the hope of achieving...............just what exactly, in terms of quantifiable consumer or industry benefit?

All the industry money in the world can't change the hard facts that the general public has no confidence in the FSA's ability to regulate the industry properly (let's face it, ALL the media coverage of the FSA is resoundingly negative) and no confidence in committing to any sort of long term retirement savings plan (because the government has reneged on the Conservatives' pre-election manifesto pledge to put right as much as possible of the damage done to the pensions framework over the past 25 years).

And because of the state of the UK economy, largely as a result of the FSA's admitted failure to regulate the banks, an increasing proportion of the UK population doesn't have any spare money anyway.

But never mind ~ it's all just OPM, so what the hell? We know what's best, so just pay up or pack up.

its a sad joke surely? a Leichtenstein passport beckons, none of this crap!

@Julian Stevens; a commendable, well composed & thought out retort. Can our 'trade' bodies not make representation on this absolute waste of money.....

Our trade bodies? Another sick joke if you ask me. The whole sad and sorry point is that the FSA, MAS, and any organisation they may morph into are simply unaccountable and to be perfectly frank haven't got a moral brain cell in their heads.

Like Julian I have missed out the expletives, so this is 10% of what I actually wrote.

Julian, very nicely put. If I may offer up a response from the FSA side (based purely on speculation and with no factual basis).

The money used to create a sustainable MAS will be a win-win for all in the Financial Sector. The other debt advice services have failed, if only RBS had popped in before it all got a little out of hand. We will succeed as the FSA has a proven track record of financing itself without a product and often with little service. Poor people can grab their laptop, Mac or PC and burn up what little electric is left on their pre-pay card, trying to understand why such a childlike web page can save them money. The answer is simple, while they are navigating the site, with such basic tools that would pull a fine from any regulated company for having on their premises, they are not shopping on eBay or Play. The money saved in the 10 to 15 minutes of this activity can be used to seek advice from a fee charging IFA...

Basically, the idea behind it is good, but the people that should be paying for debt management are Banks, loan companies and the British taxpayer and not the IFAs that deal with those saving or protecting their current value/assets. The sad thing is the idea is good, but the execution is very poor...

Quite, Stratfield.

Morally constipated and utterly unaccouantable. In fact, a perfect clone of its European origins.

Trade bodies? Aifa? Don't make me laugh!

I read somewhere my contribution to MAS was £10, even it that doubles I have got my money back ordering their excellent guides to redundancy and retirement.

but this is what worries me - the powers that be have convinced us that financial planning is everything, whilst they have nicked all our "best" & "worst" ideas for themselves.

Full of TCF zeal, I have been urging clients to complete the MAS online "healthcheck" and "budget planner" as well as revised risk questionnaires including "capacity for loss". Not had one returned - heaven forbid I try and charge for this service - Financial Planning.

Commission - Stopped for us but MAS provides free advice paid for by someone else. Indeed, the regulator, the fscs and the fos are all "free" to its consumer clients and all paid for by FS industry.

Churning - I'm sorry but stopping a Tripartide system and replacing it at large cost with the BOE, FCA & PRA (3, clue) sounds like churning to me.

Qualifications - don't see many Chartered Financial planners amongst all the people telling us how to run our lives. Do members of the board of british film censors take financial exams?

Complexity & opaqueness - will i be restricted, non restricted, independent, execution only, targeted advice, packaged products, securities, derivatives, tied up in knots - not a clue.

Product Intermediation - This is what we actually thought we were good at for the last 20 years or so and added real value for our clients. Am I to ignore this now because someone bigger and better paid has taken this role?

I am sure the authorities are doing the best they can and I really do appreciate the drop in fees (though this might be Stockholm syndrome) but if we are going to have common sense prevail - these issues need to be aired.

Thinking about it, has the MAS come up with anything that might actually be described as original? Or has it just plagiarized various stuff from a host of websites already extant that offer FOC everything that the MAS now claims to and packaged it all together as some great new hub of consumer empowerment, for which this year it plans to charge the FS industry £86.8m? That's all it seems to be really ~ an £86.8m rip-off in every sense.

MAS has little to do with the general public. It is a backside protection for the FSA. Whatever negative qualities one can attribute to the organisation, do not underestimate their intelligence. They have committed themselves to a course of action from which they are unable or unwilling to step back. But they understand, from the opposition that they have created, that RDR is not a good solution. Moreover the changes will leave a monumental gap in the advice market, especially at the lower levels.

The current activity with MAS is designed to infer that they had this option in mind all along. It ensures that they will have an excuse in place when someone starts to question the whole strategy behind RDR. Not its stated intention, but its implementation.

And to make MAS credible it has to have sufficient money to at least put on a good show. It's sort of the FSA's equivalent to the Blackpool Illuminations - a major glittery distraction.

some very good points Glen