Recommendation 179

However, we also heard from a number of witnesses that implementing the Consumer Duty has been difficult due to, as the Investment Association suggested, “the ambiguity of the rules” and the lack of clarity provided by the FCA. The Investment Association told us that obtaining a clear understanding of FCA expectations has been “challenging.” 274 Andrew Griffith MP said: “My issue with the consumer duty is not the unobjectionable desire to protect consumers, but the fact it unleashed into the wild a new duty of care that was not clear, had not been clarified, did not benefit from precedent, and created a vast amount of rework from a regulatory corpus that itself had always had regard to protecting consumers, in some cases overprotecting consumers from themselves.” 275 Caroline Wagstaff told us that the FCA “uses the word ‘consumer’ … but with no definition of what it means by that—all consumers appear to be equal.” 276