Criminal Finances Bill

Gavin Robinson Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Security (Mr Ben Wallace)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

First, may I, through you, Madam Deputy Speaker, apologise to the House on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, as she is unavoidably detained on departmental business pertaining to national security and has therefore asked me to open this debate?

Both terrorism and serious and organised crime pose a real and present threat to the UK. Those involved in terrorist activities endanger our domestic security and overseas interests. Terrorism may be the greatest threat we face, but serious criminality arguably causes the greatest harm, costing the UK at least £24 billion annually, causing loss of life, and depriving people of their security and prosperity. Right hon. and hon. Members must not doubt the scale of this problem, as it damages our economy and our communities. It also has impacts on real people, whether we are talking about a grandparent being scammed out of their life savings; the trade of weapons that enable the type of marauding firearms attacks we have seen in Paris; the smuggling of illegal drugs that blight our high streets and local neighbourhoods; or the organised trafficking of young women and children.

Those crimes have a corrosive impact on the most vulnerable in society—they ruin the lives of real people—but this is part of a truly global issue. As David Cameron has said, international corruption is

“one of the greatest enemies of progress in our time”

and the

“cancer at the heart of so many of the world’s problems”.

Financial profit is at the heart of almost all forms of serious and organised crime. The UK drugs trade alone is estimated to generate £4 billion of revenue, and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs estimates that more than £10 billion was lost to tax evasion and criminal attacks against the tax system in 2014-15 alone.

[Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)]

I agree entirely with that comment from the former Prime Minister and with the thrust of the Bill. One great concern of Christian Aid is that the Bill does not extend to or legislate for the Crown dependencies or overseas territories. Will the Minister respond to that at this early stage?

[Mr Wallace]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. The Bill does extend some of the offences and powers it contains to cover an extra-territorial extent, which will go a considerable way to getting to the bottom of money laundering, whether that be carried out here or elsewhere around the world. It also goes some way to dealing with people who evade tax overseas. Just because they are not evading our tax but are robbing another country, it does not mean that we would not still like to take action against those individuals. The Bill goes some way on that.