We continue to have the utmost sympathy for the people who have lost money because of Safe Hands.
We do not agree with the Commissioner’s finding that we didn’t identify significant risks in relation to this firm.
We had limited powers to act against funeral plan providers before Parliament gave us responsibility to regulate the sector from July 2022.
Starting in September 2021, we started to receive applications from firms wishing to offer funeral plans, including from Safe Hands. We warned them they were unlikely to meet our requirements and consequently the firm stopped trading in February 2022. We worked with Dignity and Co-op to help customers find new plans at a discounted cost.
We had received in April 2021 a single piece of anonymous intelligence that Safe Hands might be carrying out regulated activity but without our necessary permission to do so.
Knowing by then that we would soon be approving funeral providers to do business, we logged this intelligence to consider when assessing whether Safe Hands was fit to be regulated by us.
That year, we received over 34,000 pieces of intelligence about firms or individuals potentially carrying out unauthorised business. There is no way we can immediately act on all.
We must decide how to prioritise our resources to protect consumers from suspected wrongdoing and in 2021 we focused our efforts on the complex process of bringing a whole new sector – funeral providers – within our remit.
Whenever we act, we also need to consider the best route to seek information to avoid a worse outcome, for example if an unregulated firm is tipped off, potentially making protecting assets harder.
We believe the steps we took were reasonable and proportionate based on the information we received. There is no evidence that alternative action from us would have led to different outcomes for Safe Hands customers.
We cannot take responsibility for harm caused by firms before we are responsible for regulating them. For example, we are already receiving reports about consumer harm in the unregulated Buy Now Pay Later sector. We have taken actions where we can and will address other intelligence once Parliament has passed the necessary legislation and we are empowered to grant them permission or not to operate.
Read our full response to the Complaints Commissioner’s final report into Safe Hands. We have also written to the Treasury Committee to whom we are accountable and look forward to addressing any questions they have on these issues.
There is also an ongoing investigation into these matters by the Serious Fraud Office.
