Oral Answers to Questions
Kenny MacAskill Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rishi Sunak
I urge the hon. Lady to be a little bit careful about what she reads in the newspaper. At all steps in this crisis, we have indeed taken the advice of our scientific advisers. Let us go back to September, which I think is what she is referring to. At that time—as she knows from the SAGE minutes herself, which are published, rather than unsourced quotes in newspapers—the evidence was finely balanced and there were many things for Ministers to consider. The consideration at that point was that the tiered system was working and deserved to be given a chance.
Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (SNP)
Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)
Kenny MacAskill [V]
Despite furlough, high streets face devastation—first shops and now pubs, an even harder space to fill. Was the Budget not an opportunity to support what are community assets in urban as well as rural areas and where alcohol consumption is supervised and not unchecked? With supermarkets having made huge profits during lockdown, much of that through alcohol sales, is it not time to support the Social Market Foundation’s call to increase alcohol duty on off-trade to sustain the on-trade in our communities?
Steve Barclay
Many businesses across Scotland argued for the alcohol freeze, not least the Scottish whisky industry. They also argued for the fuel freeze, which my right hon. Friend the Chancellor delivered. I am also surprised, when the hon. Gentleman talks of community, that he does not even recognise the extra capacity funding that his community received in the Budget. With all these things that impact the community, clearly, the additional £1.2 billion of funding received by the Scottish Government through Barnett consequentials at the Budget will again enable the Scottish Government to work with the UK Government to deliver better services in his community.
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)
The Foreign Secretary is continuing to look very carefully at the legislative requirements and will set out further detail in due course on how the Government intend to proceed.
Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (SNP) [V]
The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Kemi Badenoch)
The hon. Gentleman will know we are carrying out an alcohol duty review that will look at all these decisions in the round, and I am very happy to speak to him in more detail specifically about any particular schemes or requests that he has.
Financial Services Bill
Kenny MacAskill ExcerptsWednesday 13th January 2021
(3 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Financial Services Bill 2019-21 View all Financial Services Bill 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 13 January 2021 - (13 Jan 2021)
Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (SNP) [V]
Obviously there is much in the Bill that deserves support, although some of it has come about through our self-inflicted wounds from Brexit. However, the greatest comment I will make is on the opportunities of what should be added and on what is currently missing. I endorse the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and support points made by other Members, particularly those who spoke to amendments 4 and 30, which deal with economic and corporate crime.
We are in a difficult time at the present moment. People are suffering. They are making sacrifices. They welcome fixed penalties being given out to those who act rashly—sometimes stupidly, sometimes deliberately. Equally, they are aware that huge rip-offs are not being dealt with and remain unpunished, which causes a great deal of angst and upset, which needs to be addressed.
When I was Justice Secretary of Scotland, I recall that we set up a serious organised crime taskforce, with a model that has been replicated elsewhere and indeed has been extended to issues beyond serious organised crime. It had clear benefits, but there were also obstacles faced by law enforcement. It had the benefit of bringing together all the agencies, but they faced the same challenges. We had to recognise the extent of the challenge and bring in organisations that had previously been left out, from environmental protection through to local government. There were clear challenges in dealing with corporate crime. There is a lack of a legislative framework—there is insufficient legislation there—to allow Police Scotland, City of London police or police services elsewhere, or the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service in Scotland, or indeed the Crown Prosecution Service south of the border, to carry out a diligent, good job. They lack the powers.
I am always minded of the Woody Guthrie song, “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd”:
“As through this world I’ve wandered, I've seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
The tragedy in this country is that it is usually quite easy to deal with those who rob you with a six-gun. Dealing with those who rob you with a fountain pen has proven far harder, which is why significant changes are required, because it is just not good enough that corporate criminals go unpunished, which we know happens. Anyone who has seen “The Inside Job”, which includes Matt Damon, will know the fraud that went on in the financial crash. We have seen LIBOR and forex. We have seen Serco.
Meanwhile, fixed penalty notices are issued for rash and stupid actions, and rightly so, but where is the responsibility being taken by the shareholders and corporate leaders? They have to be held to account. These amendments would help to address that, making sure that we have greater fairness between the small guy and the big guy, bringing us into line with the United States of America, where the wolf of Wall Street is being prosecuted, while ensuring that we keep up corporate standards, which sadly in some instances have slipped quite shamefully. It is only right and appropriate that we make sure that fraud and money laundering are dealt with every bit as strenuously and firmly as bribery and tax evasion.
These are hard times. People are making sacrifices, and it is about time that those who are abusing their powers in the corporate boardroom were held to account. We need to have the legislative framework.
Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
I rise to support the Bill and to focus my brief remarks on the wholesale market, rather than the retail market, which most Members have addressed so far. In particular, Government amendments 22 and 23, which the Minister mentioned in his opening speech, clarify beyond any doubt that non-UK firms—all firms that do not have the UK as their principal place of business—are not within the scope of the rules on the parent undertaking. That is particularly relevant to me. I brought the subject up in my Second Reading speech and it is something on which I have corresponded with the Minister and his team. I am very glad that he and the Treasury have engaged on the Bill in this way. It is a telling example of how good Ministers behave, and the Minister has been exemplary in taking on board comments on the Bill from a range of Members. I commend him for that.
I have a couple of short comments on what others have said. On new clause 16, tabled by the SNP, in my speech on Second Reading I gave my view that there is a need for increased scrutiny by this House of the regulators, but the Minister is right to say that we need to consider that in its entirety in the consultation on the future of the regulatory framework. That is the right way to do it. It is very important to get it right, and I look forward to sending in my remarks if I have not already, and seeing the Government’s response to those points.
I shall finish by addressing certain amendments that were introduced in Committee or that have been mentioned today, on the European Union—new clause 12, new clause 20 and many others—whereby, effectively, Opposition Members have tried to impose requirements on the FCA or the PRA to assess the impact of the differences between the EU and UK regulatory frameworks. The conceptual problem with that is—as I think that all hon. Members, and indeed the Government, need to see—that over the next five to 10 years we are going to be in a very different regulatory world. We need to think of attracting companies and investment on a global basis, not with a purely European focus as was the case in the past.
The Minister has already mentioned our success in relation to FinTech. The Chancellor has mentioned his focus on making sure that the London stock exchange is more attractive and effective for others coming from abroad. The European Union’s drivers and incentives are not the same as ours in this country, so it would be wrong for us to necessarily seek to follow the rules blindly. It is not a race to the bottom; it is a race for us in this country to win the global competition for safe, beneficial, productive capital and business. That is what the Bill helps set us up for.
Covid-19: Disparate Impact
Kenny MacAskill Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Kemi Badenoch
Evidence shows that Government covid-19 guidance is not reaching certain communities or audiences who are being disproportionately impacted. That is why we are providing up to £25 million to local authorities, and voluntary and community sectors, to improve the reach of official public health guidance and other messaging into specific places and groups most at risk—and that does include tier 3. We want to ensure that the funding is used to support communities and groups who have been shown to have suffered a disproportionate impact.
Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (SNP) [V]
The Minister acknowledged that disadvantage through ethnicity can be compounded further by disadvantage through disability. In those circumstances, will she press her Government colleagues to recognise the vital need to address poverty that compounds it still further, and argue for the retention of the universal credit uplift and an extension to legacy benefits, including those for the disabled?
Kemi Badenoch
I know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor have spoken about that specific issue many times in this Chamber. What I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that poverty, deprivation and various factors are contributing to health inequalities. That is something we do know. Those issues will not be solved by a year-long review. They need to be looked at across Government, as he says, and the Government are absolutely committed to that. We talk over and over again about levelling up. That is absolutely the ambition of this Government and we will do it in the ways that we believe are best.
Economic Update
Kenny MacAskill Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Rishi Sunak
I am loth to get involved in an east midlands-west midlands spat, but I very much encourage my hon. Friend in his efforts. He makes an important point about the importance of local leadership. It will be local leaders—town councils, parish councils, local authorities and local enterprise partnerships—who drive forward our recovery one area at a time.
Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (SNP) [V]
As others have mentioned and the Chancellor has acknowledged, the least well-off have suffered disproportionately from the health effects of the virus and must not pay the price of the economic consequences. Will he therefore ensure that the cost of these measures is borne not by the poor and low-paid, but by those with wealth and assets, whether in land and property here or in tax havens abroad, as so many chums in the Cabinet seem to have?
Rishi Sunak
Our record speaks for itself: this Government have done more to tackle tax evasion and avoidance than any other Government in history. We collect hundreds of billions of pounds more than has ever been collected. Indeed, I seem to recall that many of those measures were opposed by Opposition parties.