A few years ago, Financial Adviser backed the Question of Trust campaign, spearheaded by Nottingham-based chartered financial planner Shane Mullins.
It caught the attention of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, several leading MPs, the likes of Vanguard, Legal & General and the Institute of Financial Planning. But it did not get the traction it needed to continue.
Largely, people supported the idea of fostering confidence in the industry. Of showing consumers how the financial services world can be trusted. There was a suggestion of a Code of Conduct to be created as a gold standard for the industry to follow.
But in the face of this good endeavour came release after release, scandal after scandal, fraud after fraud and intense regulatory crackdowns on everything from pension transfer sharks to poor lending practices.
Having worked in financial journalism since 1999 I know there are thousands of good apples and only a few rotters out there. And if we could fill the pages of Financial Adviser with only good news about the thousands of great people just doing their daily jobs, it would make our lives easier.
But the press has a different task to perform - to uncover those rotters and seek to engage with the readers to galvanise people to do something about it. It’s not about reporting bad news because we like it, or because it is sensational, even if it is.
It is about exposing bad practice and bringing bad deeds to light - “to blow the horrid deed in every eye til tears shall drown the wind”, as it were.
Hence this week we relaunched our campaign to stamp out rogue estate agents, those few spoiled fruit that have been ruining the housing dreams of people across England and Wales.
Of the seven advisers we spoke with, all cited positive working experiences with some estate agents. Some even do cross-referrals with estate agents. But then there were some agents mentioned who just do not care about ‘codes of conduct’. Agents that do not even belong to the National Association of Estate Agents - which said it would boot out rogues if it came across them. You can’t remove someone who doesn’t belong to your membership, and who therefore doesn’t need to abide by your code of conduct.
Basically, advisers were concerned that anyone with no qualifications can encourage the sale and purchase of a property - the biggest financial transaction of most people’s lives - without any fear of retribution. Agents cannot get slapped with a Final Notice from the FCA or taken to court by the SFO for pressure tactics or bully-boy behaviour. Fraud, yes. Forcing people to use their own in-house broker, no.
Consumers have no recourse to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme or Fos if there is palpable wrongdoing by an estate agent. Consumers can take the agent through the civil courts - but this is costly and time-consuming. So most clients who have been bitten are now twice shy of all agents.
This lack of qualification and redress not only damages trust in estate agents, but also in the market in which they operate. Bad practice by one rogue could ruin the consumer’s trust in conveyancers, mortgage brokers, lenders, solicitors.
It is no wonder that advisers we have spoken to are livid that such aggressive tactics are being used on the public, and that there is no real way of knocking that behaviour on the head.
So we can expose it - and hope that by doing so people become aware of the situation - but then without the teeth to do anything to prevent such behaviour, the press also is at risk of becoming part of the problem. We are at risk of saying: “Here is bad practice. This is destroying trust. We are reporting on it, and therefore people reading this might find their trust destroyed, too, because of our article”.
It is one of those vicious circles that frustrate journalists with integrity (a category into which we aim to fall). The rightfulness of the crusade is clear: stamp out the rogues. The fear that we are exacerbating the problem without presenting a clear solution is something that we will have to deal with.
After all, journalists are simultaneously the most trusted and the least trusted members of society.
