Nearly a fifth of the supervisory and enforcement staff at the Financial Services Authority, the UK regulator that was last week handed greater powers by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling in the wake of the Northern Rock crisis, have left since 2005.

Figures obtained under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act and published today by UK satirical magazine Private Eye revealed that the number of supervisory staff at the FSA fell 14% to 695 from 807, while the percentage decline in enforcement staff numbers was twice as extreme. The FSA employed 175 enforcement staff by the end of last year, down from 243.