Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill (Third sitting)

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th October 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I call Eddie Barnes—[Interruption.] Sorry, I mean Eddie Hughes.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

Q You slightly confused me there, Chair; I thought I had forgotten my own name.

When Seema was asking about data sharing, Helena, you were saying that the Government are not going far enough. It is odd for me to ask you to second-guess the Government, but why do you think we are not going far enough? Sometimes it feels to me that people are in a hurry for legislation to do everything that needs to be done to improve a situation, whereas that, sometimes, is almost counterintuitive because it is better to do it incrementally. Let us do some stuff, get it right, come back, revise, learn and move forward again. What are your thoughts with regard to their pace of movement?

Helena Wood: The pace of movement on information sharing? I think there is an inherent tension at the heart of all global anti-financial-crime standards, which is often with how we square the circle of data privacy. They are two often quite diametrically opposing concepts. We need to find a way to not rush into this. Your point is well made. If we are going to push people into sharing more individual personal data, we need to do so in a way that utilises the best technology to preserve the privacy of innocent individuals. We need to bring in the data privacy community to make sure that whatever we craft meets the needs of that community also.

We should not—I agree—push forward so quickly with something that is inherently complex. I absolutely do not think that we should be pushing for amendments within the context of this particular Bill; we need to be looking at the issue more broadly. We need to look at how the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, which is currently stalled—I do not know what its future is—will also facilitate greater sharing for financial crime purposes while protecting individual privacy.

The simple fact is that this is a very complex and emotive issue that deserves due consideration and full public consultation. However, we have had three years. This was a key tenet of the economic crime plan that came to an end in July. There were multiple meetings to look at how we could do this and what we came up with were these two clauses, which, for me, are a missed opportunity, given that others have managed in the same timeframe to move forward with much further-reaching legislation, such as that currently being debated in Singapore and the Netherlands. I think we could go further than we need to, otherwise we get left behind.

[Eddie Hughes]

May I ask a very brief question on ID verification?

[The Chair]

I am very sorry, but we are going to have to move on to other Members. I will come back if there is time at the end for further questions.