There will be some tweaks to the way that pension funds are allowed to invest their money. There will be some modest rewriting of EU rules on the way investment banks can provide analysis of company performance. And there will be some reduction in the big bundles of paper a company needs to issue before it can sell new shares. And, er, that seems to be about it. The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt may be trying to sell his latest round of City reforms as a significant reduction in red tape that will allow the financial sector to grow again. But, in keeping with his tepid, managerial style, they lack any real vision or guts – and won’t make much difference to anyone.

When it comes to tinkering with a broken system, Hunt is proving himself an exceptional talent

When it comes to tinkering with a broken system, Hunt is proving himself an exceptional talent. In his Mansion House speech this evening, the Chancellor is expected to announce a series of reforms designed to reboot the City. In fairness, there will be some useful stuff in there. The EU’s deranged rules on the way research is paid for meant that no one analysed the performance of companies anymore because it was not financially viable to do so. Not very surprisingly, with no information the market dried up, especially for smaller companies, making it difficult to raise capital. Like so much EU regulation, by putting caution above everything else it crushed the life out of the economy. Scrapping those rules will make the London equity markets work better. Likewise, the rules on what pensions can and can’t invest in have become unnecessarily cumbersome. Relaxing them will free up some cash that the UK badly needs. Those are all useful changes.

The trouble is, it is all far too timid. The City badly needed to reboot itself as we left the EU, and as it lost its role as the main financial centre for the continent. Even before that, there was already a steep decline. The number of quoted companies has fallen by 44 per cent over the last 20 years as most decide it is not worth the hassle of selling shares to the public. There has been a steady stream of companies relisting in New York because there is so little incentive left to remain in the UK. Paris, powered by the luxury goods giant LVMH, has overtaken London as the most valuable bourse in Europe. Against that dismal backdrop, the UK needs to take radical action to allow the City to reinvent itself.

Such as? It could scrap all the ‘governance’ and ‘environmental and social’ codes and let investors go back to reading the accounts and deciding in a free market whether to buy shares or not. That would be genuinely liberating. But it would also be too radical for the timid Hunt – who prefers managed decline instead.