For the first time, the UK's Treasury Committee has used its parliamentary powers to force financial regulators to hand over documents, on pain of punishment for Contempt of Parliament.

The committee, whose chair Nicky Morgan MP took over from Andrew Tyrie MP in the summer, has set the Financial Conduct Authority the deadline of 16 February (this Friday) to publish a skilled persons’ report (done under s166 Financial Services and Markets Act 2001) into RBS’ treatment of small business customers in its Global Restructuring Group. A Treasury spokesman told Compliance Matters that the influential committee has not done this before.

Commenting on the correspondence, Morgan reportedly said: "A version of the report is now in the public domain. The FCA has completely lost control of the publication process. If the FCA doesn’t publish or provide the report by Friday, it will have breached an order of the House of Commons and may be found in contempt of Parliament. The Committee will meet when Parliament returns on Tuesday 20th February. At that meeting, I shall be asking members to agree to publish the final, unredacted report under parliamentary privilege as soon as possible."

In a terse letter to the FCA's CEO, Andrew Bailey, Morgan wrote yesterday: "I look forward to your compliance with this order."