PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Access to Cash Review (20 March 2019)

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps the Government is taking to (a) minimise the effect of IT outages on consumers’ ability to pay for goods and services and (b) ensure that digital payment systems are more reliable.

Asked by:
Jonathan Reynolds (Labour)

We take the operational resilience of the finance sector and any detrimental impacts on consumers very seriously. HM Treasury works closely with the Bank of England, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) (collectively the ‘Financial Authorities’) to assess, test and improve the operational resilience of the sector and to respond to any major disruption, including to payment systems.

In July 2018, the PRA and the FCA published a joint Discussion Paper on an approach to improve the operational resilience of firms and financial market infrastructures, including to payment systems. The Authorities will use responses to this to inform supervisory activity and future policy-making to support firms’ and FMIs’ operational resilience[i].

The Financial Authorities also have a single mechanism, the Authorities’ Response Framework, to coordinate a response to incidents affecting the finance sector. The Financial Authorities regularly exercise incident response frameworks with the sector to assess their effectiveness and identify improvements. The Bank of England held a sector resilience exercise (SIMEX18) in November 2018 which tested the joint response by public authorities and industry to a simulated disruption.

1 https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/prudential-regulation/discussion-paper/2018/dp118.pdf?la=en&hash=4238F3B14D839EBE6BEFBD6B5E5634FB95197D8A

Answered by:
John Glen (Conservative)
26 March 2019