About

Team size: 180

What were the main steps you took to protect the business once it became clear we were in the midst of an unprecedented challenge?

The pace at the start of the pandemic was relentless. Such a pace and intensity can sustain teams through a crisis, particularly when they share an acutely important public mission. However, it is not a sustainable model over a longer term, and one which we guard against within the Bank’s Legal Directorate (LD). Throughout 2020, therefore, we focused on supporting colleagues in preserving – and taking the time to invest in – their own well-being.

In parallel with this, the Governor, Andrew Bailey, has launched his new vision to make the Bank a more human and humbler place, in step with a changing world. In response, colleagues across the LD are connecting with each other and contributing ideas to shape this agenda within our legal community.

To alleviate the inevitable strain on colleagues at this challenging time, we have also embarked on a significant recruitment campaign. We want to build up our team of alert, expert and curious people to meet the expanding demand for our valued services within the Bank. This is also part of a concerted strategy to increase the diversity of our future talent pool, within the LD and across the Bank as a whole.

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last year?

In 2020, the Bank found itself at the forefront of the international economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The legal team at the Bank was closely engaged in every aspect of the Bank’s response. In the first wave alone, the Monetary Policy Committee cut interest rates to 0.1% and injected £200bn into the economy, and the Bank launched a series of new, targeted schemes, including a revised Term Funding Scheme and the Covid Corporate Financing Facility. The Bank’s supervisory arm for banks and insurers, the PRA, took numerous actions to ensure the safety and soundness of firms and maintain financial stability, including providing guidance on the regulatory treatment of provisions under IFRS9, encouraging firms to refrain from paying distributions whilst the economic impact of Covid remained uncertain and working with partners globally to delay the implementation of Basel 3.1.

Throughout all this, to fine tune the calibration of our response, we ran multiple stress tests across the banking and insurance sectors. Indeed, the Bank has a track record over recent years of running such detailed stress tests across not only banks and insurers, but also financial market infrastructures via the CBEST cyber test. These tests have been coupled with our supervisory emphasis on operational resilience, and our advancing resolution planning.

The LD has not only managed to be at the forefront of this complex, fast paced international economic response to the pandemic, but has also progressed other important legal matters for the Bank. We took joint enforcement action against Goldman Sachs International (GSI) as part of a US$2.9bn globally coordinated resolution reached between Goldman Sachs Group, the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority and a number of overseas agencies, including those based in the United States and Singapore. The PRA alone fined GSI £48.3m for risk management failings arising from GSI’s involvement in the 1MDB scandal. The LD also provided advice on a broad range legal issues relating to the new polymer £50 note – featuring the scientist, Alan Turing – which will be issued on 23 June 2021.

Looking to the risks emerging beyond 2021, the LD has also been involved in other important policy priorities for the Bank, including the transition from LIBOR to risk-free rates; the ongoing work to embed climate change into financial decisions and macroeconomic analysis (including the introduction of a climate change stress test); the effective regulation and supervision of crypto-currencies; and considering the case for a central bank digital currency. In many cases, we work on such key policy areas alongside our counterparts internationally and at the Financial conduct Authority and within HM Treasury. Good collaboration enables us to be more impactful, particularly when stretched and facing into the unseen, and this saw us through 2020.

How have you and your team found working from home, and is this a work practice you intend to carry forward post-pandemic? How important is face-to-face interaction for a legal team to function well?

Whilst we have all been subject to the same restrictions and, superficially at least, had our lives upended in similar ways, I am acutely conscious that no colleague’s experience in the last year will have been the same as another’s, and that colleagues will each have faced unique challenges and crunch points. Tragically, we also had colleagues suffer sudden bereavements, having lost loved ones to Covid-19.

Looking forward, and in common with many organisations, we are considering the lessons we have learnt from the pandemic in relation to the ways of working and harnessing best practice in determining a future policy.

There is a wide range of opinion on future ways of working and a key issue currently for all colleagues is around any return to the office. We know that some colleagues – perhaps those who live alone, or those who are new in their career – may prefer to be in the office as much as possible in the working week. Other colleagues may be more anxious about a return to the office. The Bank has been very careful in the way it approaches the return to the office in this context, and has drawn on employee networks, including the Bank’s mental health network which I co-chair, to ensure that its approach and related communications are sensitive, and duly considerate of the many responses colleagues may experience by the prospect of being in the office again.

Face-to-face interaction has been facilitated by the Bank’s investment in technology which was already in place prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. To ensure we remained a cohesive and ‘in touch’ team, there has been a concerted and collective effort by all members of the LD and compassionate and attentive line management. Thankfully, we had a good foundation of support to draw on as the Bank has a wealth of well-being resources, including an employee assistance scheme, very active employee networks and well-being champions, as well as trained mental health first aiders.