The Times and City AM quote Charlotte Hill on the FCA's plans to delete year-old emails

According to reports, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) intends to start automatically deleting emails that remained in their inbox for more than 12 months unless considered important enough to keep, raising concerns among staff and campaigners that it could frustrate efforts to hold the regulator to account.

A notice on the regulator’s intranet page reportedly stated that the new policy will “reduce the legal and reputational risk we face”, starting on 1 April.

However, under this policy, important emails must be saved to the FCA’s official data repositories which ensures those emails are retained in line with the watchdog’s retention schedules.

Charlotte Hill, Partner in our Financial Services Regulation & Funds team gave a reaction to the news and was susequently quoted in articles by The Times and City AM. She comments:

The FCA has strict rules on record keeping requirements for the firms it regulates – at least five years for investment companies, three years for others and indefinitely for pension transfer firms. Its announcement that it intends to delete its own emails after only one year is very much at odds with what it expects the industry to do. Imagine if a bank announced it was going to start deleting emails after one year!

"The FCA has said that the policy will “reduce the legal and reputational risk we face”, with the immediate thought that the concerns lie with the FCA wishing to prevent any form of investigation into the FCA’s conduct, where previous email exchanges are often produced to prove the point.  There are of course already many allegations of a “cover up”.

"The FCA has said that all information relating to its regulatory duties will be kept for 25 years, but it is only deleting “unnecessary emails”. However, it has not said what an “unnecessary” email is. An invitation to the staff Christmas party, or something more concerning?

"A further issue with this will be that if a future industry scandal comes to light, where no action was taken by the FCA despite many emails from individuals and industry participants, this will be hidden – the FCA will be able to say, quite truthfully, that it has no record of anyone ever having raised the point – a destruction of evidence.

"Not everyone will be upset by this, however. Any individual who has had an FCA investigation into their conduct is likely to welcome the chance of all records about them being destroyed.

Read the full articles in City AM here and The Times here (subscription required).