FCA Enforcement's public messaging has stressed its capacity to hold market participants to account during, and despite, the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns.
But the FCA's recent FOI responses tell a more nuanced story.
Immediately following the start of the March 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, FCA Enforcement started making some tough decisions. It aggressively rationalised its caseload. It closed investigations at an average monthly rate that hasn't been seen in the last eight years - most of these with no action taken. It reduced the number of investigations it opened on average per month to levels not seen since 2015.
And after the initial shock, there remained sustained changes in FCA Enforcement's case pipeline. For most of the rest of 2020, FCA Enforcement continued to close more investigations and open fewer investigations.
Of course, this may well have been a pragmatic response not only to FCA Enforcement's capacity constraints - it turns out the FCA isn't immune to the challenges of working remotely - but also to shifting FCA Enforcement priorities. It is after all important for FCA Enforcement resources to be deployed so as to address areas presenting the greatest risk of harm. And those areas changed swiftly in 2020 with, for example, fraud and scam risks rising to the fore.
The available data currently ends in November 2020. At that time, FCA Enforcement's case portfolio was showing early signs of stabilising, with fewer cases closed and a slight rise in cases opened.
Here's hoping that this stability is continuing into 2021 so that FCA Enforcement can open new investigations where necessary and also bring existing investigations to conclusion as expeditiously as circumstances allow.
On that point, we await the FCA's annual enforcement data with interest - in particular the data on average case durations. These ticked up in reporting year 2019-2020. Will the trend continue in 2021? Time will tell.