The Board met on Monday 4 December for our last meeting of 2023. Despite the short period since our last meeting in November, there was a lot to discuss, as the team gets going on new areas of our workplan.
The meeting started with a session with Martin Coppack from Fair by Design, about inclusive design and how to involve people with lived experience into the process of designing and delivering services (and oversight). It was a thought-provoking session and the Board agreed that taking an inclusive design approach to development of our complaints processes could be particularly powerful. We are also keen to find ways of engaging people with lived experience in our wider work. For example, I think there is a lot that we can learn from inclusive design approaches when we consider standards around vulnerability.
We moved on to discussing a scoping paper on our work to develop new standards for the enforcement sector. This will be a huge focus for us during 2024 and we will be publishing material on the scope of this project in January. For now, some of the themes we discussed included:
- The desirability of the ECB standards replacing the existing 2014 National Standards, so that there is a single set of comprehensive standards
- The need for the ECB’s standards to apply both to enforcement firms and to individual enforcement agents
- There may be some areas where we will set standards that would not be practical to expect full compliance with immediately. Where necessary, we could provide a suitable implementation period on some standards to allow meaningful engagement and sustainable changes to be made.
The Board supported the plans for extensive stakeholder engagement to inform this work, including facilitated workshops with individual enforcement agents and people with lived experience and establishment of a working group to provide regular and more detailed input and challenge as we start drafting.
Finally, we discussed proposals for what will be included in the quarterly data returns that we will require from ECB accredited firms. The proposals had been developed with input from industry and the debt advice sector and were due to be discussed further by our stakeholder engagement forum.
We discussed the importance of ensuring that all data that we seek is of value and is proportionate, and that the ECB has the capability to analyse and make use of it. We stressed the importance of seeing this as just one source of evidence that will be fed into a much wider approach to surveillance, that will help us to target our attention once we start operational supervision. The next step will be focussed consultation, including more detailed workshops, from January.
And that concluded our last Board meeting of 2023. The Board next meets in mid-January 2024, when we plan to discuss our draft corporate strategy for 2024-27, Business Plan and budget for 2024/25 and a further paper on our standards project. Until then, I wish everyone an enjoyable festive period and happy new year!