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It was as predictable as night follows day that Lord Turner, the new chairman of the FSA, will be more hands on than his predecessor, Sir Callum McCarthy.

Lord Turner is nothing if not a man certain of his views and he has strong opinions and ideas on how a well-regulated, ethical financial service, in particular on the distribution side, should look like.

As if choreographed by a higher order, his appointment came just as the meltdown in banking on both sides of the Atlantic was about to go in to full swing.

In an interview with our sister paper, the Financial Times, last week, Lord Turner made it clear that the banks' capital ratios are far from adequate and he has called for a discussions across jurisdictions on how best to resolve this.

Presumably, he is not in favour of the Basel II proposals, which in any case are bogged down with a rift between banking and insurance.

The other signal that Lord Turner has sent is that financial institutions will have to pay higher levies so that the City regulator can employ staff or train up the existing ones.

After the humiliation of Northern Rock and the inexplicable tsunami of the retail banking sector, in particular the mortgage banks, it is clear that senior executives at the regulator have a lot of explaining to do.

Understandably, his feeling that the FSA has been doing regulation on the cheap has an element of mea culpa about it, but that is not good enough.

There are still too many gaps in the regulatory framework to allow Lord Turner and his brigade of 3000-soldiers to get away with such a simple explanation.

At some points the FSA must give serious consideration to the regulation of products, for example with the actuarial assumptions underlying the management of with profit products.

Although careful scrutiny of distribution is necessary, the design and promises of products and the charging structures must also be part of the discussion.