On 7 March 2025, the High Court dismissed the claim of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Banking for judicial review of the Financial Conduct Authority’s decision in 2021 not to seek to require banks to provide further redress to customers who may have been missold interest rate hedging products between 2001 and 2011. The decision under challenge was taken after a review conducted by John Swift KC had concluded that the Financial Services Authority (as it then was) had been wrong in 2012/2013 to agree that a voluntary redress scheme should be confined to customers who met certain criteria intended to identify those more likely to be vulnerable to misselling. Some £2.2 billion of compensation was paid to customers under the redress scheme. The claim was highlighted as one The Lawyer’s Top 20 Cases of 2024.
Freedman J held in R (All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Banking) v Financial Conduct Authority [2025] EWHC 525 (Admin) that the FCA’s decision was not irrational and there had been no procedural unfairness in not consulting with customers excluded from the scheme before reaching it. The FCA had been rationally entitled to take a different view to that reached by Mr Swift as to the appropriateness of the FSA’s negotiations and decisions in 2012/13, and to conclude that the passage of time since the original misselling meant that taking action in 2021 was not justified. The judgment can be read here.
Christopher Knight, led by Richard Coleman KC, acted for the Financial Conduct Authority, instructed by Dentons UK and Middle East LLP.
