The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published its policy statement setting out the regulated fees and levies for 2020/21 covering (amongst other things) the levies for the FCA itself, the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Money and Pensions Service and the Treasury’s expenses for tackling illegal money lending (applicable to all firms with a consumer credit permission).
The final levy now includes an additional £2.3m in 2020/21 for the first year of a communications and information campaign to tackle areas where the FCA sees real risk of consumer harm. This additional levy will be allocated proportionately across all firms but the FCA state that the minimum fees would not be affected. The FCA will continue to incorporate the campaign costs into its AFR for the remaining four years of the campaign.
The final 2020/21 annual funding requirement (AFR) is £589.9m, an increase of 5.6% over 2019/20. After a rebate of £46.8m from fines, the actual fees payable £543.1m.
The final FCA levy allocation to the A19 General insurance mediation fee block is £30m, which is a 3.5% increase on the £29m charged in 2019/20.
As planned for in CP20/06, the FCA is proceeding with its plan to freeze 2020/21 minimum fees so they remain unchanged from 2019/20. This means that the 71% of firms that are small enough to only pay minimum fees will see no change in the fees they pay.
The FCA is also proceeding with its plan to extend the period for paying fees by two months to 90 days for medium and smaller firms. The FCA categorised medium and smaller firms as those firms who pay a total fees in 2020/21 of less than £10,000. This would mean that 89% of firms will have until the end of 2020 to pay their fees.
The FCA will invoice fee-payers from July 2020 onwards.
Policy Statement PS20/06 may be found here.
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