Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Layla Moran

Committee stage
Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Chairman]

We have to be careful not to allow things to be confused at Committee stage. Everyone gets their turn.

[Layla Moran]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. When the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was at the Dispatch Box, he said that he would look closely at that amendment—it was the day before the vote on the National Insurance Contributions Bill—and I urge the Minister to look at that again.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Layla Moran

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I hope to bring in the Minister at 5.55 pm at the very latest, because many questions have been asked that hon. Members want the Minister to answer, so it is only fair to give her the time to answer them. Three hon. Members have tabled new clauses to which they must have the opportunity to speak. I must ask for short speeches, please; I hope we can manage without a time limit, but if those who are speaking to their new clauses can keep to five minutes, everyone will have the opportunity, however briefly, to address the House.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

I rise to speak on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, particularly on new clause 27, which is tabled in my name.

The Liberal Democrats have concerns about this Bill. People who work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules are seeing their incomes squeezed through no fault of their own. They are being crippled by tax hikes, benefits slashes and skyrocketing bills, and today I am afraid the Chancellor is letting them down. He is providing less in extra catch-up funding for children than he is in a tax cut for bankers. In contrast, the Liberal Democrats are calling for a £15 billion catch-up fund for kids, support for small businesses and protection from energy bill rises for the most vulnerable, and we support all new clauses that help to that end. We live in precarious times and we must do more.

In the context of escalating tensions with Russia, I am also concerned about what is missing from the Bill. New clause 27 has support from both sides of this House. It is similar to new clauses 4 and 11, tabled by Labour and SNP Front Benchers—I am grateful to them for rowing behind this clause—but it also has Conservative Members as signatories, which goes to show the cross-party support for bringing in this measure.

The new clause asks for an impact assessment to be produced on the operation of the new economic crime levy, and would require the Government to assess how a register of beneficial owners of property would contribute to the effectiveness of such a levy. Sadly, due to the scope of the Bill, the new clause cannot introduce such a register, but that does not make the need for it any less urgent.

The register would close the loopholes that allow oligarchs to launder money through British property. Lax regulations have turned London into a playground and a laundromat for Russian oligarchs, with successive warnings from the intelligence and security communities painting the city as “Londongrad”. Prior to the pandemic, Transparency International identified 87,000 properties in England and Wales that were owned by anonymous companies registered in tax havens. A new analysis has found that, of the £6.7 billion-worth of UK property bought with suspicious money, £1.5 billion comes from Russia.

On Monday, the Foreign Secretary spoke about introducing new sanctions, and I welcomed that. It is interesting that The Moscow Times reported on Monday that the Kremlin was “alarmed” at the British threat and vowed to retaliate. The dirty money that oligarchs invest in yachts, football clubs and Belgravia mansions has close ties to Putin’s own wealth. We know how he operates: he gives them the money to buy the assets. If we aim at the oligarchs, we aim at Putin, but there is a problem, because we cannot sanction what we cannot see. Claims from the Government that we are standing up to Putin’s military manoeuvres ring hollow when he and his friends know full well that they have already hidden half the money in our own back garden, and the Government continue to do nothing about it.

Dirty money also undermines our credibility with our allies. The Centre for American Progress, a think-tank closely linked to the Biden Administration, said:

“Uprooting…oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom”.

I am afraid to say that the stench of corruption and dirty money wafts over our political system and the whole country, and it is incumbent on us here and the Government to clean it up. There is a way to do that, and it is through the economic crime Bill, but waiting for that feels like waiting for Godot. It should not be this difficult to get the Government to make good on their own promises, because it was a Conservative Government six years ago who said they would introduce it. Two thousand days later and we have had nothing.

Just this week, the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and announced plans for a register of beneficial ownership, but at this stage it feels like he is the boy who cried wolf. I urge the Minister to accept new clause 27, which has support on both sides of the House, to start those tentative steps, to show Putin we are serious and to make sure that we clean up dirty money from our politics and our country for good.

UN International Day of Education

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Layla Moran

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD) [V]]

I congratulate the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) on securing this important debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. We mark this International Day of Education in a year like no other. More than half of the world’s student population still face significant disruption to their education. This year we have been outraged by the number of British children who cannot learn from home. More than ever, it has become clear that access to the internet and, more importantly, the information it carries, should be a right as much as clean running water. This emergency extends far beyond our UK borders. The scale of the education emergency is almost impossible to comprehend. At least a third of the world’s schoolchildren have been unable to access remote learning at all during the school closures. According to UNICEF data, three quarters of children not reached by remote learning globally live in the poorest households or rural areas.

The consequences of that are far-reaching. It means that more children will be forced into child marriage or child labour. It may also mean more children permanently dropping out of education altogether. It is one of the great injustices of our times, and there will not be a vaccine that will immediately fix it. In the year when the UK has the presidency of the G7, we are also hosting COP26. The eyes of the world are looking to us to lead. The Foreign Secretary has said that girls’ education is a core priority for the Government.  That is a laudable aim and one that I fully support. The thing is, though, the official development assistance allocations released on Tuesday paint a slightly different picture. The Government’s proposed cut in aid to 0.5% of gross national income, counter to their manifesto promises, comes on top of a year-on-year decline in the share of aid budget allocated to education.

I heard just this week that the budget for education in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is to halve. I would like to know whether that is true, but it is worth looking at this year’s figures. A total of 5.6% of our development budget is currently spent on education. That is well below the 15% international benchmark. Halving that would be very short-sighted and, frankly, a scandal.

The UK must lead in the creation of the global education plan. The fact that so far nothing has been pledged, despite our hosting that summit in the summer, flies in the face of the Government’s own policies. I urge our country to pledge the £600 million to the Global Partnership for Education, as suggested by the Send My Friend to School campaign. There is, of course, the climate crisis and the two are linked. Many studies have shown that investing in education is one of the best ways of tackling the climate crisis. There is no better way for us to make a difference in this world than investing in education, and I urge the Government to do exactly that today.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

The hon. Lady has exceeded her time. I call Kim Johnson.

Covid-19

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Layla Moran

Monday 2nd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

I feel a bit queasy after the speech by the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), not because of what he said but because of the microphones—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I thank the hon. Lady for mentioning it, and I apologise on behalf of the House to the hon. Gentleman who has just spoken. There seemed to be a little bit of disruption and I could not work out what it was, because I could hear something wrong, but other people could not. There is something wrong in the sound system, and I simply apologise to the hon. Gentleman, and we hope that it will be fixed.

[Layla Moran]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I want first to tell the story of what has happened in Oxfordshire over the past couple of weeks. I want to put on record my thanks to the Minister for spending time with me and the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) earlier this week, but we were in a strange situation where, as a county, we were raring to go into tier 2. We had been looking at the data and, particularly, listening to the director of public health, but not just to him. All the councils were on board, as were the Oxfordshire Association of Care Providers, the police, both universities and, critically, the local enterprise partnership—all pulling in the same direction, all saying, “We are deeply concerned about the way that the virus is now being transmitted in wider communities. It is now leaking into the 60-plus bracket, and we are worried about overwhelming our local NHS.” So we asked gold command to give us a tier 2 status. Two weeks ago, we were saddened that that was not allowed, and then last week we found out that only Oxford city was going to go into tier 2 and the rest of the county was not, against what was very much a cross-party view, except for those Conservative Members in this House who did not want that to happen.

I have yet to get to the bottom of exactly why that happened. The Minister said that she would go away and look at it: I appreciate that events have overtaken us since then, but at some point we will get through this phase. I have heard the Secretary of State say many times that he believes in the tier system. If he does, it has failed us. We are in the situation we are in now because it has failed us and because test, trace and isolate—particularly the “isolate” bit—is not working.

I believe that people will adhere to this lockdown. They are annoyed and upset—I am sure that many Members’ inboxes are full of people expressing their concern—but they will do it. However, I do not believe they will do it again. This is two strikes, and on a third strike the Government will have a real problem on their hands in terms of the public adhering to a lockdown again. That brings us to where I think we need to be focusing next, which is on an exit strategy. There are many of us across the House who are concerned by this, because an exit strategy is not just a need to decrease R below 1. Yes, we know that that is the start, but what is concerning is that we have done that once before and it has not worked. The tier system has not worked. We have not got on top of this.

What I want to propose in an elevator pitch today is what I, others across this House and Members from the other place have come up with as an exit strategy, which involves three stages. The first has the advantage of being exactly where the Government are now, which is that we bring R below 1. The second stage is critical and it does not involve tiers. It is a national approach that involves, first of all, getting those cases low enough so that TTI works properly, and quantifying what that is. The other part of it is new. It is making use of something that we have that other countries in Europe do not have, which is our unique geography. We start to fight this virus at our borders by testing and quarantining people who are coming in and out. The countries that are beating the virus are doing exactly that—places such as Taiwan and New Zealand. We have to change the approach—if we do not do so then we will keep doing the same thing over and again—and wait to the point of elimination when, hopefully, therapeutics and a vaccine will come to save us. Until we get to that point, I urge the Government to think through their approach again.