By Steve Conley
On 15th July 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered her Mansion House speech. It was framed as a call to growth—cutting red tape, modernising regulation, and making Britain “the best place in the world for financial services.” The Treasury’s messaging was polished, its tone upbeat, and its targets clear: unlock capital, cut regulatory burdens, and empower industry.
But missing—once again—was the voice of the people.
The reforms were sweeping: dilution of the Senior Managers Certification Regime, curbs on the Financial Ombudsman Service’s powers, relaxed vetting for leadership, and a raft of changes to ring-fencing and redress mechanisms. In the same breath as praise for compliance and innovation came policies that make poor conduct easier to conceal and harder to remedy.
The Transparency Task Force has responded swiftly and brilliantly, calling for urgent parliamentary scrutiny. Their Open Letter and Press Statement lay bare the risks of these reforms—an unravelling of post-crisis protections wrapped in the language of progress. I stand with them in this call for accountability.
But as I sat with these developments, another thought grew stronger in me:
We cannot fix this system by appealing to the same powers that built it.
We have to build something else.
The Illusion of Reform
Let’s be honest. The Mansion House reforms don’t come out of nowhere. They’re part of a long pattern of regulatory capture and institutionalised amnesia.
Each time the system breaks—LIBOR, PPI, pensions, car finance—we patch it up with new oversight, only to see those protections quietly diluted when growth is back on the agenda. The reforms touted as modernisation are, in fact, a return to old habits: light-touch regulation, safe harbours for misconduct, and a hierarchy of priorities with profit at the top and people at the bottom.
You can only repaint a crumbling house so many times before you have to face the truth: it wasn’t built for the people who live in it.
From Crisis Management to Systemic Redesign
This isn’t to diminish the work of reformers. The Transparency Task Force and others have been relentless in their scrutiny, courageous in their advocacy. Their efforts are essential—but they must not be our only line of defence.
While watchdogs bark at the gates, someone has to start building the new village.
That means:
- Empowering citizens with tools to self-investigate and self-advocate
- Creating systems of financial planning that don’t rely on product sales or regulatory loopholes
- Designing frameworks for justice and redress that aren’t bottlenecked by quasi-legal technicalities
- Teaching communities to manage money and meaning in the same conversation, not in separate silos
This is not the work of lobbying. This is the work of liberation.
The Age of Empowerment
The Piscean financial era—vertical, opaque, extractive—is losing its grip. What’s rising is Aquarian: decentralised, transparent, holistic. But it won’t rise on its own. It needs builders.
It needs us.
I’ve sat in rooms with City leaders where the consumer never enters the conversation. I’ve sat with victims of financial crime who’ve been blamed, ignored, and retraumatised by redress systems that seem designed to fail. And I’ve seen what happens when people are given the right tools, language, and community—they don’t just recover. They lead.
We must build a system where that leadership is the norm, not the exception.
Reform Is Not Enough
Reform is reactive. Reform is permission-seeking. Reform means asking the old system to please be a little kinder. And the problem is, even when it says yes—it rarely means it.
We need to shift from reforming extraction to replacing it with empowerment.
That means designing systems of support that don’t depend on political will or corporate cooperation. It means creating ecosystems where transparency is the default, not the demand. And it means refusing to play a game that was never meant for us to win.
An Invitation to Fellow Builders
To those inside the regulatory perimeter: keep sounding the alarm. To those outside: keep building the lifeboats.
We need both.
But let us not be lulled into thinking that high-street scandals and boardroom speeches are the full story. The real transformation will come from below, from within, from the edges. From planners who serve no master but purpose. From citizens who become their own best advocate. From communities who refuse to wait for permission to heal, grow, and thrive.
The Mansion House may be full of mirrors—but we are building windows.
And soon enough, a door.
Steve Conley is a financial reform campaigner, citizen advocate, and founder of the Academy of Life Planning. He works with individuals, planners, and victims of financial crime to reclaim autonomy from systems of control, through holistic frameworks and citizen-powered justice.
Academy of Life Planning 