Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2015 Grand Committee

I remember debating with the noble Lord, Lord Flight, a year ago on the banking reform Bill when he said that if some of the proposals in respect of company directors and anti-money laundering went through, we would see people disappearing from the City of London and working in places such as Geneva. I wonder what the people working in Geneva are thinking this week. I suspect it is about coming back to Britain, if indeed they ever left, because it has turned out to be not quite the haven they might have regarded it as being. My view is that the City of London and British business are extremely strong. It is a place where people want to work. We should be setting the highest standards within it to make it better, stronger and more widely regarded. To those who say that if we bring in legislation that is stronger than currently exists we will scare people away, I repeat the words that I think I said during the banking reform Bill—if those sorts of people are scared off that easily then, frankly, let them go.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 44. It seems to me that this is an example of the Government getting slightly cold feet about their own proposals. If this Bill is supposed to create a public document—a public register—there is no going back. Surely it is public and saying “but only in certain circumstances” seems to display a lack of coherence. I am not merely worried about potentially trying to curtail the rights of journalists to expose just the sort of malfeasance that we might wish to expose. Once things are made public, surely they should be public documents that can be used for whatever purpose people wish. If there is a fear that, for instance, animal rights activists might put such a register to use, the answer is obviously that certain companies and individuals can claim exemption in the first place and will not appear on the register. However, once the register is there, a public document has, surely, to be accessible to the public.

[Lord Borwick]

I support my noble friend Lord Flight’s amendments. I declare my interest as before. I understand why my noble friend the Minister is proposing this, although I am not sure that I agree with it. The task is surely to design these rules so that they have the least impact on honest taxpayers. The tax legislation that we have is so enormous, and growing at such a vast rate every year, that I would be amazed if anybody knows of any human being who has actually said they have read all of it. There are not only enormous complexities in our tax legislation but vast powers for HMRC to enforce it. With this legislation, we are in danger of producing a group of citizen tax collectors who believe that it is possible—that it is their right—to go through the register and come out with an opportunity to accuse a company of paying insufficient tax. The effect of that would be that a newspaper or other media outlet, or an NGO, will pursue the case, and I am afraid that, as a result, the duties on HMRC to look into it will be rather greater than they are at present. Rather than reducing the burden on HMRC, as was mentioned earlier, I have a feeling that this legislation will increase it rather dramatically. This whole area of legislation is rife with unintended consequences.

My noble friend mentioned activists. An animal rights activist, for example, was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison last year, I think, for attacking people connected with Huntingdon Life Sciences—sending incendiary devices, hoax bombs and other such stuff. The anti-fracking demonstrators in Balcombe threatened similar activities. All of this legislation is open to abuse in a most remarkably comprehensive fashion, which is why I believe that this information should only be available to those people listed in my noble friend Lord Flight’s Amendment 44H.