The Consumer Panel's annual report for 2005/06 is published today. For the first time, it includes a more formal assessment of how the Consumer Panel thinks the FSA is doing in fulfilling its obligations to consumers in the way that it regulates the financial services industry.

Overall the assessment is acceptable to strong, with the FSA scoring well in having paid more attention to communicating with consumers and in being a dedicated voice for the UK consumer in discussions on European proposals to change financial services markets across Europe.

However, there are issues where the Panel would like the FSA to do more and has therefore given them a weak score. The Panel uses the annual report to re-emphasise its disappointment with FSA delay in action on the selling of self certification mortgages and generic advice and FSA decisions not to differentiate high risk funds for consumers or to remove the limits on compensation through FOS and FSCS.

The Chairman of the Financial Services Consumer Panel, John Howard said:

"We have assessed the FSA's performance from the perspective of the Consumer Panel as a more informed group of individual consumers. We recognise that the FSA has to take into account a wider range of factors than purely the consumer remit, but nevertheless we believe that this is a useful way to give an overall perspective of how well the FSA is performing for consumers. There is no area where we have scored the FSA as very weak, and believe that overall the FSA has done a reasonable job in safeguarding consumers of financial services over the past year."

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