Ms Derville Rowland:

I will reply because I am dealing with this area of business. I want to confirm we have been proactively engaged from an early juncture, since we saw the breaking impact of Covid-19 on the business community, the devastating effect on hard-pressed people and their families who have been working hard on their businesses, and the economic and health impacts. Because of this, we were out front and centre from an early stage, and we were clear with the insurance industry about our expectations. Mr. Sibley and I wrote to the industry to be clear about this. When the Minister indicated that he wished for businesses to close, we were very specific that this should be taken as a binding direction.

We are very clear that valid policies should be paid out. We have worked proactively to identify all businesses in the jurisdiction, whether authorised by us or passporting into the jurisdiction from abroad, to identify all of the firms and relevant business interruption policies, and then to go through them to make sure our expectations are being met. We are supervising to make sure the decisions where the policies do not cover the business interruption are appropriately identified. It is a fact that a lot of these policies do not cover these particular circumstances. We are also supervising to make sure that where valid claims are being made and can be claimed under Covid-19, they are being met. This is happening and we continue to scrutinise them. We have identified the areas where there is debate about these policies and we are proactively engaging.

I want to make a point about the UK system, which is entirely different from ours. It has a specific provision in its rules of court to provide for actions of that type to be taken by the FCA, which does not have a parallel in this jurisdiction. We are engaged with entities. I will not comment on cases before the court but we published our supervisory framework detailing our approach and we are proactively engaged. We are certainly holding the firms to account through a wide range of supervisory powers. This is our firm intent.