Nascent right wing party Restore has called for regulatory bodies the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority to be scrapped entirely in order to revive London’s “position as a pre-eminent financial centre.”
The policy paper was authored by Restore leader Rupert Lowe and Stephen Cooper, who was described as having worked in the UK financial services industry for decades. It claimed that London’s “decline” as a financial centre began in 1997 with Gordon Brown’s first budget as Chancellor, which abolished the ability of pension funds to reclaim tax credits on dividends from UK companies.
The paper also claimed that the 2018 collapse of Carillion showed “that an overgrown rulebook is no substitute for a high-trust culture”. It also argues that regulation since the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 have “crushed risk-taking, driven growth companies overseas, and left London’s capital markets a shadow of their former selves.”
It also claimed that a Restore Britain government would scrap the FCA and PRA, and replace them with “industry self-governance and common law”, with the Bank of England taking sole responsibility for overseeing the banking system.
Lowe says: “When I started work in the City of London in 1979, London was Europe’s and arguably the world’s pre-eminent centre for risk-taking and financial innovation. Today a labyrinth of laws, regulations and bureaucracy has crushed that spirit. The decline of high finance in the country that invented it was a political choice made over decades. Restore Britain intends to reverse it.”
The Restore paper also pointed to statistics showing that in 1999, the value of Britain’s listed companies was equivalent to around 175 per cent of GDP, compared with 153 per cent in the US. As of 2026, Britain’s stock market is worth less than half as much as America’s relative to the size of their respective economies. Apple alone is also now worth almost as much as the entire London Stock Exchange Main Market.
Initially elected as an MP for the Reform party in 2024, Lowe formed the Restore party in 2025 after breaking away from the group.
