Financial Transparency: Overseas Territories

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and Joe Powell

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Joe Powell (Kensington and Bayswater) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) on securing this debate and on his election to the chair of the excellent all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax. I thank other Members here and the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir Andrew Mitchell) for championing this issue.

We last met in this Chamber to debate this issue seven months ago to the day, so it is helpful to have another debate to check on progress and demonstrate to the overseas territories the strength of cross-party feeling about it. Such debates do have an impact. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West and I were featured in a cartoon in a BVI newspaper not long ago for bringing this issue up so frequently in the House—I take that as a badge of honour.

The Government’s commitment to make London the anti-corruption capital of the world, as opposed to a dirty money capital, is extremely welcome. I know the Minister is personally committed to that agenda, and I look forward to the anti-corruption strategy in the next few weeks.

[Sir Andrew Mitchell]

Although the hon. Gentleman may have been in a cartoon, Baroness Hodge and I were the subject of a demonstration in one of the overseas territories, with placards saying, “Let’s hang Mitchell and Hodge”.

[Joe Powell]

I am sure we all agree that we would not support that action.

I want to make a serious point about where progress has been made. Some of us recently met the leader of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo. Gibraltar now has an open register, and he told us that it has had no impact on investment there. In fact, it has attracted a different type of investor: those making sustainable, long-term investments into a reliable market where financial secrecy is not undermining the strength of the financial services.

I note that in the Public Gallery there is a representative of St Helena, which has made great progress—as others have said, we are also meeting representatives of the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. Although it is not perfect, there has been political commitment from those leaders to make progress and work together.

But the harms are still severe: serious organised crime, drugs on our streets, the high streets issue that many hon. Members have spoken about, sanctions evasion, tax dodging, environmental crime, destruction of tropical forests and property. I invite Members to join me on our “Kensington Against Dirty Money” walking tour, which Baroness Hodge and I conduct in my constituency. The No. 1 source of foreign ownership of property—my constituency has 6,000 such properties—is the BVI. The question is: why? It is not a victimless crime, and we need to understand why it is happening.

Let me very briefly talk about next steps. I really welcome Baroness Hodge’s trip to the BVI. She is a fearless champion for this issue. It would be good to understand the BVI’s red lines for a legitimate interests test. I think it should be broad, reliable and repeated access for those journalists who have helped to uncover so many issues in the past, while maintaining the Government’s long-term goal of publicly accessible beneficial ownership registers as the gold standard.

The summit on illicit finance next year is a huge opportunity; it was great that the Deputy Prime Minister confirmed that on the world stage at the UN General Assembly this year. The summit will be 10 years on from the 2016 anti-corruption summit, where public registers of beneficial ownership for UK companies were first introduced. Could the summit be the moment when we finally move forward on this issue, too?

Overseas Territories: Tax Transparency

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and Joe Powell

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Joe Powell]

I thank the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury for his response, and I thank all hon. Members who have spoken for their contributions. This has been a productive and constructive debate. There has been a lot of agreement on the problem. We heard the tax case very strongly, particularly from the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean). We heard the housing and communities case, particularly from my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake). We heard the economic growth case from my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell), the poverty and inequality case from my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) and the constitutional case from the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), which took us through the history over the past decade of missed deadlines and opportunities for the action we are talking about to be taken.

I hesitate to say that this will be the last debate in this place on this topic—I suspect it will not be—but I welcome the Exchequer Secretary’s commitment. I think he was being quite polite when he said that the Government wished to see an improvement to the BVI’s proposal. The BVI needs to go back to the drawing board and bring back a proposal fully in line with the principles that Parliament concluded were the best action for this problem, which is full public registries of beneficial ownership.

In final closing, I thank the spokespersons for the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, the hon. Members for Lewes (James MacCleary) and for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), respectively, for their constructive contributions. I agree that there may be some legitimate uses of offshore tax centres, in particular for companies in multiple jurisdictions, but the heart of the problem is that the BVI, the Caymans, Bermuda and others are still far too susceptible to very serious illicit crime.

If there is one message that I would like all hon. Members to take home it is that this is not an abstract problem. It is not something just to do with billions and trillions in the financial system. It is about constituents who are being chased by HMRC who feel the double standards; it is about our housing crisis and empty properties; it is about our sanctions, their enforcement, and support for autocrats such as Putin, and it is about our public finances.

We have a strong case for why we need to act, and I reiterate my thanks to the Minister for his outlining of the next steps. The June deadline to see progress from the overseas territories is imminent, but as the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield said, this area is littered with missed deadlines. We need a proper deterrent from the British Government to say what will happen if the territories pass those deadlines and no action has been taken.

[Mr Mitchell]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Joe Powell]

If I am allowed to.

[Karl Turner (in the Chair)]

Sure.

[Mr Mitchell]

We have another three minutes, so I am keen to help out.

To be clear, we are talking here about dirty money and the source of this money—money stolen from Africa and from Africans. The baddies have all the best tunes, and they have the money to get their way, so the forces of law and order are always fighting to catch up. It is important to emphasise the open registers. The mist fell from all our eyes when, thanks to the BBC and The Guardian newspaper, the Paradise and Panama papers were published. They showed that, without this open register approach, we cannot join up the dots to see what those clever villains are doing, catch them, trap the money and hopefully return it. The hon. Gentleman and I agree completely, but I hope that we can carry the Government with us.

[Joe Powell]

I thank my co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, where we talk about this a lot.

Exhibit A is the UK public register of company ownership—when introduced, we were told that there would be all sorts of capital flight and that people would not come here to buy properties and invest, but that has simply not been the case. The register has now been in existence for several years. In fact, many of the countries that were the source of corruption and dirty money are now implementing public registries: Nigeria, Indonesia and Kenya, to name but a few.

We know action is possible—Gibraltar and others among the overseas territories have already done it—and it is now incumbent on the others to follow suit. I implore the Government to keep the pressure on so that we do not have to come back too many more times to debates such as this to re-analyse the same problem that we all agree is there, when we know the policy solution is within our grasp.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered tax transparency in the Overseas Territories.