Safeguarding in the Aid Sector

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord and will certainly convey to the Secretary of State his remarks about her handling of the crisis thus far. I also recognise his deep experience of leadership in this field. He asked a very specific question about what we knew when. I should say that the chairman of the IDC in the other place has confirmed that the committee is commencing an inquiry into this, and we will be co-operating fully.

The Charity Commission is also going to undertake an inquiry into this. The elements of who knew what and when are very important issues, but they will be addressed at that time. At the moment, all we would say is that, although DfID was informed that the investigation had concluded on 5 September 2011 and that all members who had been found not to have followed Oxfam’s code of conduct had left the organisation, its letter states that no allegations involved beneficiaries or the misuse of DfID funds. That was the reason for the very strong line that the Secretary of State used in her Statement in the other place about how DfID was potentially misled in this respect. Again, that will be something on which there will be full disclosure and transparency so we understand what happened and when. We will be co-operating with the Charity Commission and the IDC on those inquiries.

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I have a family interest to declare inasmuch as my daughter has worked for the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development for the past 10 years. That is not a material interest, but it is one I should properly declare. Does my noble friend share my view that there may be very inadequate ethical training in many of our charities? Ethical training is not a central part of their DNA, particularly in the larger and more bureaucratic charities. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, that cultural change is desperately needed, particularly in some of our larger charities. Bringing about cultural change takes a very long time. It takes years and it needs ethical training of the highest level. That is something which many charities need to turn their attention to urgently.

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is absolutely right on this. There is a core problem which we have seen across different organisations. We have had to wrestle with these issues in recent years: the fear of asking the difficult probing questions when they are needed or the failure to be transparent about what has happened. Organisations are doing that—one does not like to say “for understandable reasons”—because they want to protect the reputation of the organisation. If anyone wants to know whether that works, ask Oxfam today when its reputation has been so tarnished and damaged by the failure to take that kind of prompt action and to ask the most difficult and searching questions in these areas at the right time.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [HL]

Lord Patten Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 6th December 2017 Lords Chamber

I drafted the amendments to show what a slightly more predictable outcome might look like in conjunction with the money laundering regulations. I beg to move.

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, rising for the second time during Committee, I remind the Committee, as on the previous occasion, that I have interests in the financial services world. Having declared that, I must also declare that I love the new concept that the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, has introduced of not a probing amendment but a “probing probing amendment”, which is exactly what Hansard will, now that I have repeated it, have to record tomorrow for posterity. This will go down over the centuries and may be multiplied in many more ways.

I am fascinated by the point that she made about the read across from EU directives, but I rise to make a “probing speech”—I am more modest—about whether we need to take account in our discussion in Committee today of the announcement that the EU made only yesterday, 5 December, when the Economics Commissioner for the first time blacklisted 17 countries for money laundering. This is the first time that the EU has ever done this. It included Barbados and Grenada. It also grey listed—that is, put on watch—a whole load more, including British territories such as the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, for possible money laundering. Do we need to consider this? It is a listing, not a directive, but it is linked to what the EU specifically called “aggressive tax avoidance”, which is what we are very concerned about and do not want to see.

This is the first time that the European Union has gone into this issue. Commissioner Moscovici has urged all members to continue to agree on “dissuasive national sanctions”—believe me, Hansard, those are the words he used: “dissuasive national sanctions”. I thought that we had long ago done just this, in this country and in other international fora, when we produced endless lists of countries that should or should not be under the cosh of being blacklisted or grey listed. Do we need any more of this? Were we involved with the EU in discussing whether there should be blacklisting or “grey” listing of the countries? Did we try to dissuade it from going around the same old course again and making it very much more complicated in this first, highly immature step into such listings?

My probing question is: do we approve of what the EU has done? My second probing question is: does it relate to the Bill in any way, and should we be concerned with it, because I strongly support the Bill?

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Patten, may be very interested in the next group of amendments, given the theme that he has just raised. He may have raised it because he cannot remain for that group, but if he has the opportunity, he will get a thorough response to the questions that he has just raised—possibly not from the Government, but certainly from other Benches.

I rise to explain the origin of this particular amendment. This came as a consequence again from the meetings that the Minister very kindly was able to offer to discuss the content of the Bill. The Minister will be aware of how strongly I feel about the importance of keeping the democratic process embedded in creating anti-money laundering legislation by essentially taking those powers that are undertaken by the European Parliament and the Council and transferring them to this Parliament, rather than to government Ministers and executive control. That is the underlying issue that essentially faces this Bill, and we discussed some of that earlier.

When we were in that discussion and proposed something very simple—the text of Amendment 68A, which took the existing 2017 regulations, put them on to the face of the Bill and then said they could be amended only by primary legislation in order to make sure that that democratic process continued—two primary issues were raised with us. First, it was said that sometimes action would need to be fast-tracked. We took care of that, as your Lordships who were here will remember, under Amendment 69A, which provided a fast-track mechanism for those moments of emergency. However, I notice from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report that, when it probed to try to find examples of those emergencies, the FCO could not come up with a single one, which the committee was not very impressed by. But let us accept that there are times when there are emergencies—and there certainly is a role that FATF plays—so we made a carve-out for that.

The second issue that was raised with us was that it would be impossible to change in the Bill the language of regulations tied to the European Union and convert it over to a UK equivalent—that was almost too impossible for anybody who was sitting there drafting the Bill even to contemplate. The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, who is a fearsome drafter, very rapidly took pen to paper and drafted an amendment which pretty much does that. She accepts that the amendment may not be absolutely perfect, but she does not have the resources or legal staff that the department has available to do the checks and complete conversions. I believe that this particular transposition took about an hour, and I think that anybody on the government Benches would agree that, in terms of making that shift, the amendment probably does 98% to 99% of what is necessary and is in need of only a little refinement.

The amendment makes it clear to the Government, since such a challenge was thrown down, that there is a very simple way—it is a relatively short new clause—to cover what, apparently, was one of the primary obstacles or difficulties for moving through the primary legislation route. This would leave the policy framework and principles in place as part of a democratic process, rather than requiring that all of those be abandoned and we just go to a regulation process on these very fundamental issues.

As my noble friend has said, these provisions can place great burdens on business and—we will come on to this later—can lead to the creation of criminal offences, with imprisonment for up to two years; can define the defences available against prosecution; can put in place new supervisors and change the powers of those supervisors; and can redefine every other piece of legislation that uses the phrase “terrorist financing”, using sweeping wide powers.

I understand the Government would have loved to have been able to do that in primary legislation but could not see a way through and was therefore forced to try and do this through a regulatory mechanism. This amendment is just one of those examples that makes it clear that it can be done, and I hope the Government will take it seriously.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is right, and I am sorry if I have not been very clear on this. The key point was that the stylistic terms “grey list” and “blacklist”, which may be for general convenience, were not reflected in what we were saying—rather, it is a demonstration of commitments by the 30 jurisdictions named to address the concerns of the EU Code of Conduct Group. So we are more discussing the semantics of the terms that might be used to describe a jurisdiction which is complying or not complying, or progressing or not progressing, towards addressing concerns of the Code of Conduct Group.

[Lord Patten]

It is extremely important that we have the terminology right. If I have got it wrong, I apologise to the territories involved. I think—I ask my noble friend to reflect on this—that it is perfectly daft to put a British Overseas Territory such as Bermuda on a list of whatever shade of grey, because I believe that it is a very upright outfit and a suitable, well-run territory for financial services, and I do not believe that it is involved in money laundering. But it has been fingered in reports, and Commissioner Moscovici said yesterday that it was on some sort of grey list. We need a certain amount of clarity, because it is damaging to those people who do business with Bermuda. So I agree with my noble friend.

[Lord Bates]

That is a good point.

HIV and AIDS

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, of all the issues facing all those concerned with diminishing the spread of AIDS and HIV that are highlighted in this report, one of the most intractable and difficult to deal with is the damage inflicted by stigma. It is, of course, very easy to call for different ways of approaching the problem: more money, for example—the UK is showing a lead in this area, and we should be proud of that—or indeed, bashing the pharmaceutical industry for its charges. I would caution all to remember that these companies are not a public but a private good, however much their drugs may do public good in the end. It is shareholder funds, not government or charitable donations that make such wonderful ground-breaking research possible—going off from paid-for antiretrovirals and spinning off into generics—so we need to work with them, not against them, all the way.

Changing attitudes is just as difficult, expensive and long term as is the research that provides those new drugs and eventually their generic equivalents. This remains a huge challenge, particularly in reaching the poorest and most marginalised, leaving no one behind. Stigma stops people going for HIV tests in the first place, finding support without shame, telling their family and friends or taking the potentially life-saving drugs—all this from the apparent fear of being rejected by those you love the most, of losing your job, of abuse from your community and the rest.

I am told that we urgently need much more systematic stigma-reduction initiatives, particularly in Africa. Who told me this? Well, I listened during the debate on Syria—the one that bumped the noble Baroness’s debate seven weeks forward into a new year—to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the need to do more to protect Christians and other minority non-Christian faith groups in the Near East, citing as his source the work done on the ground by his daughter. Borrowing from the episcopal book, and listening to what the most reverend Primate had to say, I hope that if it is all right for him it is all right for me to lean on briefings that I have had from my daughter who, ever since she came down from university, has worked with the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. That organisation has been working flat out on trying to help on stigma reduction in Africa since the epidemic began. CAFOD and its partners, of all faiths and none, implement a broad range of HIV-related programmes from providing information on transmission, care, prevention, counselling and spiritual support to those of all faiths and none.

In three African countries—Kenya, Zambia and Ethiopia—back in 2010, CAFOD set up what I believe to be a brilliant and ground-breaking survey into the causes of stigma carried out by local people living with AIDS who, after proper training, asked people about stigma. Its findings were shared very widely. It revealed invaluable information about, say, differences between urban and rural communities or what drives some, rather than taking the antiretrovirals available, to spend what must be to them fabulous sums of money on traditional medicines and on the purveyors of traditional medicines. Our daughter has seen and heard much of the efficiency of this research-based evidence in visits to each of the three countries, going right up to the Eritrean border. She will be there again in March this year, listening and talking in particular to women—Muslim women as well as to Catholic women or those with no religion at all. The more the work of CAFOD and other organisations like it is successful in reducing stigma, the greater will be the parallel reduction in the spread of the epidemic.

Unless stigma is reduced, so that people living with and affected by HIV are helped with advice on how to live—and, most of all, simply how to take their antiretrovirals—then all the money spent and all the scientific advances that are made will be all the less effective. That is for certain. I hope that Her Majesty’s Government take stigma-reduction programmes very seriously indeed.

Human Rights

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, like the words “location, location, location” in a very different context, “consistency, consistency, consistency” should be the key to our Government’s attitude to countries that violate human rights. Our foreign policy must be realistic—of course I recognise that. I am in favour of our trading nation having the commercial foreign policy that we are developing. However, I am also in favour of the motif once used so effectively by the late Robin Cook: the need for an ethical foreign policy. The two are not at odds and indeed both trade and aid can be used as powerful levers to bring about change over the years in delinquent countries. To illustrate this I will compare and contrast our attitude in this context, particularly in relation to religious freedoms, on Iran and on Turkey, where there are dominant Governments.

I turn first to Iran. While all are hopeful that Mr Rouhani, the new President, may make things better for persecuted minorities, we should all recall that instant warm words of welcome in the media for apparent, new liberal change around the world often have to be eaten pretty quickly, as the plight of the poor Copts in Egypt, highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, shows us at the moment. They are clearly the most up-to-date victims of religious clearances in Africa. In Iran, all religious groups other than orthodox Muslims are now in the religious cleansing firing line under Mr Rouhani’s new presidency. There is no or little freedom and much persecution of all those who are not Muslims, from Sufi dervishes to evangelical Christians, from the poor Baha’is, who are so persecuted, to those Armenian and Assyrian churches who happen to conduct their services in Farsi, which is thought not to be acceptable. Some of those churches are still being closed down under the new liberal presidency of Mr Rouhani.

There has been little visible change and a bit of hope, and the Government have been very robust in trying to do what they can to help and to condemn such persecution in Iran. Good. Strangely, however, the Government seem—although perhaps I am misguided—to pull their punches a bit on Turkey, a country which is always described as “mildly Islamist” in polite diplomatic discourse. Bad. Is it mildly Islamist for Turkey to suppress the ancient Greek monastery on Halki island, or to restrict the freedoms of worship of the Alevis in Turkey? Is it “mildly Islamist” to make it impossible for Christians to have public places of worship established in the seaside holiday-making areas of coastal Turkey? One Anglican clergyman has told me that they have to flit from house to house underground to have underground services, as if they were living in some kind of penal times—and actually they are living in some kind of penal times.

I am very glad that some of our leading western Christian leaders have got off their knees at long last to say that this anti-Christian trend must be resisted. I hasten to add that I recognise that being on their knees is part of the day job of right reverend Prelates, and others, as they pray for us in need of their prayers. But I am glad that they have shown this leadership. A few years ago, I took part in a debate in this place with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, which highlighted the apparent onset of Christian clearances in Iraq. It is a bit late now, as those clearances are more or less complete. Turkey next? I do not know—I hope not—but I do know that it is not “mildly Islamist” to disperse with such terrifying violence peaceful demonstrations in Gezi Park in central Istanbul, where I have walked, rightly condemned by Amnesty International for its “large-scale human rights violations”. Is it indeed respectful of freedom of expression for so-called “mildly Islamist” Turkey to have in its prisons more journalists than any other country on earth, including China? Only three days ago, on Monday, it was reported that the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey, Mr Bulent Arinc, is calling for the former Christian basilica of Hagia Sophia, presently a secular museum, to be opened up for prayer—I guess Muslim prayer.

In my noble friend’s wind-up, could she find a moment or two just to explain to your Lordships what exactly is meant by the phrase “mildly Islamist”, or do we turn a blind eye to what is going on in Turkey?

Ethical and Sustainable Fashion

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, the more alert of your Lordships may notice that I seem to be the only member of the Tory party Back-Bench fashionista tendency rising this evening. I do that for a number of reasons. One is that I admire what the British fashion industry produces. The noble Baroness referred to that in her introductory speech, and I will not repeat it. I also admire very much the creativity of the British fashion industry. About a month ago, I was very glad to be at my first ever London Fashion Week show, the Matthew Williamson show. I sat in rapt attention on the edge of the seat: indeed, the seats seem to have been designed to ensure that you sat in rapt attention during the whole show watching the models sashay past. It is no wonder to me that the British fashion industry is growing and is contributing so much. Certainly, it is one of the top 20 productive sectors in this country, which has to be a very good thing. The imagination of the British fashion industry is also good. We can see a Matthew Williamson or a Stella McCartney dress being paired with something from Primark or Topshop. That has gone all over the globe, which is much to the credit of those involved.

However, I agree that the ethical issues must be addressed, and I have four points that I wish to make. My first point is the only one which I believe is unique to the fashion industry; namely, that the fashion industry has done a bit, but not enough, to discourage the image of the thin, verging on anorexic, and therefore ill, model in its shows and photographs and the casting agencies which cast these models. Occasionally, there is a bit of breast-beating about it, but I do not think that there is a continuing programme to discourage 13 and 14 year-old girls and boys who want to be models one day. Its message should be to eat responsibly, just as the drink industry should tell people to drink responsibly. I urge the noble Baroness, with her influence in the fashion industry, to press this hard.

My second point is that I do not think there is anything peculiar or unique to the fashion industry in the need to manage the supply chain properly and responsibly. It is not just in fashion that we see these problems; it is in the use of children in other parts of the world in manufacturing carpets and toys, as well as in the use of young people who are not very well paid in putting chips into hand-held telephones. A responsible corporation monitors the supply chain and makes sure that it treats those who work in it properly. Much more needs to be done by good corporations in this area.

Thirdly, a very good tool is to hand in the condign punishments available under the UK’s Bribery Act and bribery legislation. UK companies which permit their supply chains to bribe and act in a corrupt way are those which do not treat their workforces very well. We should ensure that the Bribery Act provisions are implemented the whole way down the line. That would add to health and safety, and to better pay and conditions.

Fourthly and lastly, ethical and good companies are very appealing to customers, investors and the young of all sorts who go into the shops to buy those goods. Good corporations have the very highest ethical standards. The Prime Minister’s presently absentee guru, Steve Hilton—I believe that he is now in the west of the United States—used to run Good Business. It was founded on the highest ethical standards. I look forward to welcoming Steve Hilton back when he comes to re-guru for the Prime Minister next year.

Women: Special Operations Executive

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

It is indeed never too late until it is too late. These women were quintessential volunteers who were not just put on active service. That makes their bravery all the more extraordinary and all the more deserving of such enduring recognition that our nation can give before time passes the last of them by.

I have, via a splendid late member of my family by marriage, knowledge of the self-effacing style of someone who, while not in the SOE ranks, served at Bletchley Park. More accurately, because of that discretion, I have next to no knowledge of what she did. She cited until her dying day that life-saving reason, official secrets—the doctrine to which the wartime of both sexes cleaved so honourably in a pre-Wikileaks age. She may well have sat next to my noble friend Lady Trumpington, but, if so, she went to her grave keeping that secret—and quite right too.

Such discretion was all the more vital for those in the SOE—whether they were skilful controllers such as Vera Atkins CBE, masterful asset that she was, or those who she dispatched, such as the 26 women who came back from France and the 13 women who, alas, were left behind. They operated sometimes with 13-pound radios and dragged trailing antennae behind them as they moved through the countryside at night.

If it is right, as it has so belatedly been judged to be, to recognise the totally male heroism of Bomber Command, then by the exact same token, as the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said in her magnificent speech, such recognition should be accorded to these women. It is never too late until it is too late. Do not let us leave it until it really is too late.