Whatever Lady Thatcher's historic achievements - they were formidable - fragments of her legacy pop up in all sorts of places, not always helpfully.

Take the Financial Services Authority. The Thatcher Government hit on the seemingly virtuous concept of self-regulation.

Let the practitioner pay. Rogue life assurance sellers, say, give everyone in life assurance a bad name and make it harder to sell.

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So it is in the interest of those who are not rogues to pay for a regulator to weed out the bad boys. Best of all, the taxpayer doesn't pay.

To start with, there was an outfit called the Personal Investment Authority, which didn't cost much.

It spent much of its time disciplining feckless independent financial advisers who failed to pay its fees. It probably also deterred some hanky panky, but you never know about things that don't happen.

Then came pensions misselling - abetted by a scandalous Thatcher Government advertising campaign - and then the Blair Government's Financial Service Act. That made regulation statutory and gave us the FSA. It was no longer cheap - its 2005/06 budget amounts to £212 million.

But it still doesn't cost the taxpayer a penny. Not as a taxpayer, that is. You contribute indirectly every time you pay an insurance premium or a bank charge, use any kind of financial service.

Then there are the fines. They mount up to serious money, too. Six figures is routine and a sprinkling run to to seven.

FSA people are po-faced about this shower of gold. "Ideally we don't want any fines, because nobody does anything wrong," one said yesterday. "Of course it is never going to be like that."

The fine money is solemnly set aside - no, not for staff bonuses - but to fund a rebate against the next year's fees paid by the banks, insurance companies, stockbrokers and the rest.

The FSA's financial wizards supposedly draw up their budget without a thought to how much more the market will bear and how the rebates will soften the blow.

The FSA won't grind to a halt without the fines. But it is staffed by human beings cursed with the ordinary human sense that an extra million or two will make life easier.

It also has a statutory duty to root out wrong-doers. It would do a poor job if it just sat back and waited for whistle- blowers and victims' complaints.

But the inevitable result is that the FSA is always looking for something else. It tends, naturally enough, to look in places that it knows already. Maybe that is how Berkeley Berry Birch in Coventry came to run into three separate, unrelated, FSA investigations.

Another complaint is that it is difficult to strike a deal with the FSA, to draw a line under the affair and say "That's, that", as you sometimes could with the Inland Revenue (that may have changed now that it is merged with HM Customs).

Would it be better if Lady T had never thought of self- regulation and handed the job to the police, or some old- style civil servants funded, not too lavishly, by the taxpayer?