Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords] (Sixth sitting)

Jo Stevens Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland probably shares quite a few of these views. She made a comprehensive and weighty case; I just want to build on a couple of elements of it. We have recognised on Second Reading and during this discussion that Britain and the British Parliament have a really good record in this area. We should be proud that we are world-leading, and we should continue to be so. As we debate this transition Bill, which is a Brexit Bill at its heart, we should ensure that we remain at the forefront.

We can have the best fence in the world, but there are limits to what we can do if this goes on to our neighbours’ properties. If we have a special relationship with our neighbour, perhaps there are better ways of doing it—I will not torture that metaphor further. At its root, this is clearly a problem that needs solving. The hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire characterised it as a wrong that needs righting. The Panama papers listed the British Virgin Islands as the No. 1 location for those issues. Similarly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland said, Oxfam listed Bermuda as No. 1, and we have seen the briefing materials from Christian Aid. Just so this cannot be portrayed as an activist campaign—as though that could be a bad thing—HSBC and even BHP Billiton say that this is the sort of thing we need. BHP Billiton is the world’s biggest mining company, so it is not often that it and I are bedfellows, but it understands that unclear audit trails for money are bad for its business. They are bad for the communities from which the money comes, but also bad for BHP Billiton’s global finance enterprises, so it is urging us to take action.

This proposal is proportionate. We heard on Second Reading that, given that the overseas territories have had a difficult few months, time has been built into the proposal. There is recognition of how the Crown dependencies ought to be supported. Ministers have said throughout this Bill Committee that, when it comes to the overseas territories, we are responsible for foreign affairs and security. Absolutely—I could not agree more—and anti-money laundering and dirty money passing over borders in massive quantities are at the root of security and foreign affairs. Money laundering underpins global terror, and we ought to be squeezing it wherever we can, because that is one way of cutting off those networks. The combatants we engage with may seem like they are hidden in hills and hard to find, and are perhaps not like us, but from all we have been through over the past 20 years, we know that they have some very sophisticated cells, behind which is big money. This is a chance to clamp down on that.

This will say a lot about us as we go into the brave new post-Brexit world. We have heard the phrase “brand Britain”—the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire talked about our brand—and who we are and where we place ourselves in the world will be very important to it. On the one hand, our Ministers are going round the world saying that we have a great approach to money laundering, but on the other, these are British overseas territories—the Minister referred to them as overseas territories, but they are British overseas territories, and our name is attached to them.

[Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, although there are some very good things in the Bill, not dealing with secrecy in relation to the overseas territories will damage the credibility of the rest of the Bill and will put it in danger?

[Alex Norris]

I thank my hon. Friend for that useful intervention. I absolutely agree. We should not see the Paradise papers and the Panama papers as the past, and assume that we will not see anything about this issue again. We are likely to see such things periodically on different programmes and in different newspapers. Every time that happens, people will ask, “What did you do about it? When you heard about it last time, how did you act?” If we say, “Well, we have this brilliant law, which we consider world-leading, but we stopped short of doing this,” people will wonder why we did that, and that will damage our brand.

This is not just about the British overseas territories—people will say, “Hang on a minute. They are British. What are you doing in your engagement with them?”—but about the Crown dependencies. The Crown will, dare I say, be a very important part of brand Britain, and people will draw a very straight line. Even if we feel that we should not be able to act in this area, people will expect that we can, so we ought to have a pretty clear picture on it. What is being asked for in the two new clauses is proportionate and sensible, and hopefully something that we can all support.