Economic Crime

Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I completely agree with the important contribution that our anti-corruption tsar has made in the House today. I think it is a really short-term view to believe that our British economy can flourish on the back of dirty money. We will flourish if we clean up the act in the City of London and it again becomes a trusted institution.

I just wonder how many Panama papers, Paradise papers, Pandora papers, FinCEN—Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—leaks, laundromat leaks, Falciani leaks and Luxembourg leaks we need for our Government to wake up, stop mouthing warm words, which they do a lot, and start acting with tough measures to bear down on this dangerous crime and this terrible trend.

A proposal to toughen up the regulatory framework was included in the 2015 Conservative party manifesto. The party pledged—I hope I am quoting accurately—to create a criminal offence where companies

“fail to put in place measures”

to prevent economic crime. The Government launched a consultation that lasted four years, and then parked the issue in the long grass by referring it to the Law Commission. I understand that the Law Commission is about to report, but we need and want corporate liability reform, and we want it now.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

It is a delight to work with the right hon. Lady on this particular issue. As part of the Law Commission consultation, there is talk that, instead of there being a criminal liability for failing to prevent economic crime within a corporation, it may be downgraded to a regulatory offence. Does she agree that that would not create the deterrent we need for these corporations, such as NatWest, which is facing a fine of £340 million for not properly monitoring money laundering in this country in a Bradford jewellery company? Does she agree that there must be a serious sanction, such as a criminal offence, where individuals could be locked up for not doing the right thing in these areas?

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

Again, I am pleased to see such unity across the Chamber today. I completely agree that if it is not made a criminal offence and there is no direct liability on the individuals concerned, it simply becomes a business cost and will not change the behaviour or conduct of those big corporations. I concur with the hon. Gentleman.

I was going to use the example, although I probably do not need to, of the Serious Fraud Office’s failure to successfully prosecute the Barclays bank case. As many observed at the time, that case showed that under our existing law the bank could not be held accountable for the actions of its employees, and the chief executive could not be held to account for the actions of the bank. Nobody could be held to account. These reforms would change that by introducing a vicarious liability condition and bringing in a “failure to prevent” clause. The Americans do it; they have much tougher laws that hit the corporations with criminal, civil and regulatory penalties, and they secure many more resources.

Our second ask is about starting the work to strengthen our enforcement by reforming Companies House. Creating a public register of beneficial ownership was an important move when David Cameron was our Prime Minister, and a huge step forward. In one year, the register was accessed more than 2 billion times, but the data, as we all know, is often inaccurate or incomplete. Global Witness did an analysis in 2018 that showed that 10,000 companies declare a foreign company—mostly linked to a secrecy jurisdiction—as the owner of the company, 335,000 companies had no beneficial owner and 9,000 companies were controlled by beneficial owners who each controlled more than 100 companies, so they were nominee beneficial owners.

It takes £12 to set up a company—it is ridiculous. That is why so many UK companies keep appearing in all the leaks we get of wrongdoing. Our lax enforcement leads to tragedies worldwide, and we need to do something about that. That is why these reforms could be funded by raising the fee. If we quadrupled the fee and charged 50 quid to start a company, we would raise a huge amount of money that we could put into reforming Companies House and ensuring that it had unique identifiers for the beneficial owners, and powers to investigate and interrogate.

My third proposal, which I will deal with very quickly, concerns the introduction of a property register. Buying a property through a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands is the easiest way to launder money into the UK. There are very few good reasons for maintaining anonymity, but plenty of bad ones: not just money laundering, but avoiding stamp duty, inheritance tax and other taxes.

It is difficult to put a number on that, although many people have tried, but I will share one fact with the House. All London boroughs have had an increase in their electoral register over recent times; the only borough that has not is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the reason being that such a large number of properties there are bought through shell companies by foreign owners that there are fewer residents there today than there were 10 years ago.

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[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate, and to follow the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), who is such a champion in this area. I add my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important and timely debate. This debate is urgent, particularly since, as the right hon. Lady said, the Government promised and intend to bring forward legislation in the form of an economic crime Bill. All we are asking for are things the Government have promised to do in the past, so we are pretty much on the same page. We must ensure that the Bill is brought forward quickly, because it is so important, and that it is brought forward in the same form. I am disappointed that there are not as many speakers as I might wish on the Government Benches, but it is wrong to think that this is not a political priority for many of my colleagues, and for Members across the House. It is good that 40 parliamentarians signed a recent letter on the issue to the Prime Minister, urging action in this area.

Perhaps some parliamentarians, and perhaps the public at large, do not feel that economic crime affects them. Perhaps in many people’s eyes it is a victimless crime, but nothing could be further from the truth. For evidence of that, we should look at the 27 victims—men, women and children—who drowned in the channel only a few days ago. They were victims of economic crime. Of course, the reasons people want to come to this country are manifold, including fear of persecution, or for a better life—whatever those reasons may be—but those journeys are enabled because they are facilitated by economic criminals, and people who benefit from economic crime. These are organised criminals.

If someone steals a little bit of money—£200 in cash, say—they can go down the pub and spend it or do something else with it. If someone benefits from a huge amount of money—these organised criminals are benefiting by millions of pounds from the business of people trafficking—how do they use that money? They cannot simply buy a house, which the right hon. Lady referred to, or a yacht; people cannot spend their ill-gotten gains in any way these days because there are checks and balances—some checks and balances. If a person goes to buy a house, somebody will say, “What’s the source of your moneys?” However, they do not check too far, and we cannot follow the money as far as we need to follow it.

If we want evidence of the importance of this, we should listen to the people who really understand economic crime. Paul Stanfield, the head of organised crime at Interpol, said recently:

“It’s all about the money. If you want to tackle organized crime, you have to go after the money.”

The small boats crisis is probably the No. 1 domestic political priority in the UK. It is a humanitarian crisis and it is an economic crime. In fact, there are two levels of economic crime in this area. One is the fact that organised criminals are taking huge amounts of money—thousands, or tens of thousands of pounds—from desperate people to cross a continent. That is an economic crime in itself, but that money is then laundered, and much of it is laundered through this country.

For evidence of that, we should listen to the Prime Minister’s corruption tsar, my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), who said exactly this in an intervention a few moments ago. This country is used because of some of our lax regulations, as the right hon. Member for Barking mentioned, but also because of the concentration of advisers in this country, be they lawyers, accountants, consultants—these other people who facilitate the rabbit holes that this money goes down so that it can then be used for legitimate purposes. That is what happens with this money, but the starting point is these terrible crimes.

Of course, we are talking not just about huge international organised criminals, but about domestic organised criminals. Recently, a Yorkshire “businessman” called Manni Hussain had an unexplained wealth order made against him by the National Crime Agency for £10 million. He presented himself as a bona fide businessperson, but he has connections with some of the worst organised criminals in this country. Murderers, drug dealers—all these people are facilitating crime in this country, and we are leaving open loopholes that we could close and clean up our economy.

Of course, there are lots of vested interests in this whole argument. Some would say, “Oh my God, all this dirty money will stop coming into the UK. It’ll damage our economy.” In my view as a businessperson, nothing could be further from the truth. What businesspeople need is a clean economy. That is the foundation of our economy—a clean framework that investors have confidence in. The more our law upholds that framework, the more successful our economy will be. But even if that money was good for this country, we are not interested in it; it can go somewhere else. We must show leadership in this context on the world stage.

And this is about the world stage. If anyone wants to look at how these rabbit holes work and how pernicious this activity is for billions of people on our planet, they should read the wonderful book “Moneyland” by Oliver Bullough. It is a fantastic book. He starts off with a very interesting story about former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and talks about this huge house he has—one of many palaces that he built around Ukraine, all from the expropriation of moneys from the Ukrainian people. He diverted money that was supposed to be there for health services and many other public services into his own coffers, and he eventually ended up in exile in Russia. He is a very brave man, Oliver Bullough, and he explains how this all happens. He explains very clearly how it could not happen without the rabbit holes that are enabled in this very country. It is not just the UK, to be fair. Some are enabled by our overseas territories and Crown dependencies—the Government are bringing forward, after a lot of pressure from people such as the right hon. Member for Barking, open registers of shell companies in those jurisdictions—and by many other countries, too. The US is very guilty, with places such as Dakota allowing similarly lax regimes. We want other countries to do the same. Such opportunities are facilitating some of the worst crimes known to humanity: people trafficking; drug dealing; organised crime; terrorism, which the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned; the expropriation of public money; and the impoverishment of nations.



A report from Oxfam in 2000 talked about how money was being stolen by kleptocrats in developing nations around the world to the tune of £50 billion a year. We have big debates in this House about our international aid budget and whether it is used wisely. Significant amounts of money—our taxpayers’ money—are put into developing nations. In that year, internationally £50 billion went into developing nations. Can we guess how much money was moved out of those very countries by kleptocrats, officials and politicians? It was £50 billion—so, in one door and out the other. We are facilitating that and we can close it down.

Whether it is £10 million for the smaller scale organised criminal or billions of pounds for international kleptocrats, we have the opportunity to close those things down. The money is no use to anybody unless they can spend it. To spend it, they need to be able to salt it away and legitimise it. That is what our shell companies do under the lax regime of Companies House, where £12 sets up a company with no checks and balances, no identity checks and no requirement to check who is the beneficial owner. Trusts are not included, so money can go into trusts. There is no oversight of trusts in the UK or UK property. The Government, rightly, say they will bring forward a register of overseas entities. The City of London—its knowledge, its power, our legal firms and our accountancy firms—facilitates this stuff to the tune of £100 billion a year in the UK. As the motion sets out, £100 billion a year is money laundered in the UK. That figure is directly from the National Crime Agency and that is not even the full extent of economic crime—it is that big.

Paul Stanfield says that we have to follow the money. The point, ironically, is that our system stops us from following the money. That is what we need to address. The key to all of this is transparency. Everything needs to be more transparent. That is the point about Companies House. Companies House should become not just a register but a regulator, with checks and balances to make sure that the people setting up companies are the beneficial owners of those companies. It is quite straightforward: as the right hon. Lady the Member for Barking said, a simple levy on top of the £12 would provide the resources to do that. We need a register of overseas entities, so we can see who is buying UK properties—again, the Government have committed to doing that.

I want to come on to transparency in other contexts. I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I was involved in a business until March this year when it was sold. Last year, when things looked pretty tough, we took on quite a significant coronavirus business interruption loan. We never drew it down. We repaid it without touching it when we realised that the recession was not going to be as hard as we thought on our business, but it was a significant amount of money.

Whether we are talking about CBILS or the bounce back loan scheme, the Government decided that it would not make these loans subject to public scrutiny—loans which were providing Government support, effectively enabled by taxpayers’ money. If I, as a businessperson, had taken taxpayers’ money, I would have no problem with that being open to public scrutiny. It is good if it is subject to it—what is wrong with that level of transparency? The Government decided not to make that transparent, but we had to provide some level of transparency because of our association with the European Union.

Bloomberg got hold of this issue and scraped the data on 45,000 companies—hon. Members can read its report, which was in the paper last week—and there were some very startling cases. One included a £4.7 million loan that was drawn down by a company that existed only two days prior. There are lots of different concerns about those programmes. Some of that loan may be legitimate, although it seems unlikely that it was bona fide, because the company would have had to be a viable trading company before that time. However, if all this stuff is open to public scrutiny, it could be looked at by people such as us and those who have more time to do it, such as journalists, who do a fantastic job in this area by highlighting these issues—where would be without the investigative journalists who look at this kind of stuff? That would deter people in the first place from drawing down a loan in such circumstances and, because people would know that they would be pursued, it would reduce the level of fraud. This is a key issue for the Government in relation to the furlough scheme, the bounce back loan scheme and other areas. I cannot see how it would be detrimental to our economy to have more transparency in these areas. I am thinking particularly of Companies House reform and the register of British overseas entities.

My final point on the motion is about the offence of a failure to prevent economic crime. That is so important. This is an extension of the “failure to prevent” offence that exists, for example, for bribery—so if an organisation does not put checks and balances in place to make sure that its staff are not bribing other people or customers to try to get work, for example, it is breaking the law. That is a criminal offence, and it relates to tax evasion as well.

We want to extend that offence to cover economic crime. That means—I spoke about the NatWest example—that if a company does not put measures in place to prevent money laundering, so there are not checks and balance throughout an organisation to prevent that, it has corporate criminal liability. As I said, I would like to see that as individual criminal liability, because that would provide the biggest deterrent for senior executives and mean that they clamp down on the wrong kind of behaviour in their organisation. We can look at the construction sector for an example. This is a bit tangential, but the number of accidents and deaths on building sites dropped markedly only when directors suddenly had personal criminal liability over health and safety on their construction sites. Personal liability makes a big difference. Otherwise, this is seen as just a cost of doing business.

The “failure to prevent” offence does not just cover money laundering, and that is key. If we spoke to the banks about this, they would say, “We have that covered already under money-laundering rules”, but this is not just about money laundering. The corporate criminal offence is a tougher penalty and is available to the Serious Fraud Office rather than just the regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, and it covers other crimes.

As many people know, in the all-party group on fair business banking we have dealt with the fall-out of the financial crisis in relation to RBS, the Global Restructuring Group, Lloyds, and HBOS Reading in particular. Let us look at the HBOS Reading scandal. For 10 years, Lloyds and HBOS denied any wrongdoing and that a fraud was happening in their organisations before it was proven in court in 2017, and four people went to jail for 47 years. It is the only case in the history of fraud ever proven against a bank in this country, and we know there has been more than that. Nevertheless, there was denial for 10 years.

Over that 10-year period, going back as early as 2007, victims were saying to Halifax Bank of Scotland and then to Lloyds bank, “There is fraud going on in your bank.” They were ignored; it was denial after denial. When an individual within Lloyds, its senior risk manager Sally Masterton, wrote a report on it and gave it to the bank, it sacked her. It shut her down for five years, saying that she was not a cogent witness and that she was acting for her own reasons rather than on a company instruction. That turned out not to be the case, and the bank had to retract the claim and compensate her in 2018. If we had the “failure to prevent” offence, that could not happen. People in those organisations would be accountable at a senior level, and that would clamp down on such behaviour. It would be a tremendous deterrent. It would also work with lawyers and accountants, because they too have responsibility to prevent economic crime. Instead of being facilitators, they would be required to stop this stuff happening.

We are currently having plenty of conversations in debates about how we can prevent scams such as push payment fraud, particularly on platforms including social media. The “Online Harms” White Paper refers to user-generated content rather than corporate-level scams. The Government are talking about expanding the Online Safety Bill to include those, but a requirement to prevent economic crime could work for Facebook, Google and the rest of them as well.

At present, platforms such as Google can simply take money from the highest bidder. They accept “pay per click” for companies to advertise investment opportunities, without checking whether they are bona fide companies. They do not check whether a company is Standard Chartered or someone posing as Standard Chartered; they simply take the money and let the company advertise on their sites, with no checks and balances and no requirement for them. If there were a “failure to prevent economic crime” provision, they would not be able to do that. They would have to put in place those checks and balances to ensure that the companies concerned were the companies that they were purporting to be, which, as we all know, is not beyond the wit of those platforms. This would tackle many different hugely important issues at the same time.

I have spoken for far too long, Madam Deputy Speaker, but all these matters are so important. The Government could introduce the necessary measures very quickly, and I urge them to do so. I believe that they will, and when we see that legislation, Members on both sides of the House will be championing them from the rooftops.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I am very pleased to follow the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), and I welcome his collaboration with my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). They both advanced powerful arguments in opening the debate.

I want to focus briefly on one specific point. I mentioned, in an intervention on my right hon. Friend, the Work and Pensions Committee’s inquiry into pension scams, which reported a little while ago. This is an important area of economic crime, and our report highlighted in particular the menace of online scams, which the hon. Gentleman has just mentioned. As he said, the Online Safety Bill presents a unique opportunity to address this menace. The Prime Minister has said that tackling online fraud is one of the Bill’s main aims, but the current version, which is undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny, leaves out the major part of the problem. That must be changed.

The campaigner Mark Taber gave evidence to our inquiry. He found the compare-uk-bonds.co.uk fake comparison site on Google, and reported it to Google in May last year. An elderly woman who had recently been bereaved contacted him after losing more than £200,000 to that scam site on Google in September. Google finally took it down in December. People think that if they find something on Google, somebody must have vetted it, but of course they have not. Google gets paid by scammers, and then also gets paid by regulators to warn about the scammers people find on Google. It is a pretty good business. I have no idea why Google did not take that scam down in May. Was it because the company was disorganised? Was it because it wanted to keep the advertising income coming in? Google will not say, and I do not imagine that we will ever know. What this shows us is that the law must be changed. If it is not changed, crooks will continue to ruin the lives of thousands by advertising scams online. That would be an unforgivable failure of Government.

Last year, the Pension Scams Industry Group estimated that £10 billion had been lost to pension scams by 40,000 people since the pension freedoms were introduced by George Osborne in 2015. I welcome some of the recent changes that have been made to help. The new Pensions Schemes Act 2021 will restrict the statutory right to transfer, which was given in the pension freedoms, where there are signs of a scam. The High Court recently ruled that the fraud compensation fund could be used to compensate pension liberation scam victims. Those are both welcome steps, but we need to do more. In particular, we must tackle the menace of online scams. The insurer Aviva told the Work and Pensions Committee that in the six months before it gave us its evidence it had found 27 scam websites purporting to be Aviva. Having found them, it takes quite a lot of effort to get them taken down, and there are always victims before the sites are removed.

In the Online Safety Bill, the Government are tackling user-generated scams, but not paid-for scam adverts. That needs to be changed, because it is the scam adverts that are the heart of the problem. That is not just the view of my Committee and the Treasury Committee; it is the view of almost everyone outside Whitehall who has looked at this, except for the internet companies. The Governor of the Bank of England told the Treasury Committee that the risk to consumers from online fraud

“could be tackled through the Online Harms Legislation, but the experience so far...is that there is strong resistance in other parts of the official sector to extending the legislation to financial services. This is a serious problem.”

He is absolutely right.

The City of London police wrote to the Work and Pensions Committee in May that the exclusion of advertisements and cloned websites from the Online Safety Bill

“leaves a gap in the protection provided for the public”.

The City of London police went on to call for

“legislation requiring a duty to protect and/or corporate criminal liability for failure to prevent across all online and telecommunications enablers.”

The Financial Conduct Authority told us in evidence to the Committee that

“financial harms should be included in the Online Safety Bill to ensure that online platform operators take responsibility for the material which they disseminate which could cause consumers financial harm.”

That is absolutely right as well. The Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee in July that

“one of the key objectives of the Online Safety Bill is to tackle online fraud”.

I welcome and applaud that pledge, yet the Bill as it stands entirely misses the major problem of online fraud, which is paid-for advertising.

Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com, Sir Richard Branson and Dawn French have all had their name or image used in online scams. They all wrote to the Prime Minister last month calling for the Online Safety Bill to tackle scams, pointing out that the current Bill will penalise someone who posts a scam, but not someone who pays to post the same scam. They went on to say that the

“Government has said it wants to eventually tackle scam adverts through changing advertising regulation—but this will have to go through a lengthy process of legislating in the face of fierce opposition from a powerful advertising industry.”

We understand that work to address the problem of scam advertising is going on somewhere—the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, I think—but on a much longer timetable. If that is the track we go down, it will be years before anything changes, and thousands more people will lose their life savings in the meantime.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That is a really interesting quote. Who is in the “powerful advertising industry”? The only people I can see benefiting from scams posted in the paid-ads section of Google are those at Google, not those in the advertising industry.

[Stephen Timms]

That hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. I know that Ministers have been looking into this issue. As I understand it, there is now a very complex infrastructure around advertising. Google is at the end of the chain, but there are all sorts of agencies and intermediaries—a whole industry—in the middle. I imagine that letter is referring to the fact that all those people in the middle would say, “No, don’t touch this because it’s working very well.” It is working well for them, but I am afraid that for the public it definitely is not. If we wait in the way suggested in the letter, it will let crooks and scammers continue to ruin people’s lives for years to come. That would be a catastrophic Government failure. My plea is for Ministers to change course now, face up to the undoubted technical challenges, and legislate in the Online Safety Bill.

Finally, I agree with a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking in opening the debate: this is an existential threat to the UK economy. Financial services account for a big part of our economy, and we have a worldwide reputation and provide a great deal of expertise and high-quality services. If people conclude that they can no longer trust our financial services sector because fraud is being allowed to run rife, that is a massive threat not just to that industry but to our entire economy. We really do need to tackle economic crime, face it head on, and make the kind of changes that my right hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton have argued for, to protect not just the customers of these services but the entire economy.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lee Rowley)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to contribute to this debate; it has been a good and constructive one and I am grateful to all those who have contributed. In particular, I congratulate the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), who has done extraordinary work in this area for so many years, first on the Public Accounts Committee—I had the privilege of sitting on it a few years after the right hon. Lady, but her reputation went beyond her time there—and now in the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax that she is pursuing. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) for the extraordinary work he continues to do for so many people, referred to by other hon. Members today, through his all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking. I thank them both for securing this important debate.

I have heard many important points today underlining the evils and dangers of all forms of economic crime—fraud, corruption, tax evasion, laundering, terrorism, potential people-trafficking, organised crime, drugs and the expropriation of public money. I agree with them. Economic crime is every bit as insidious as hon. Members have so cogently argued today. I reiterate that the Government are committed to continuing to build a framework that will deter such crimes and provide the genuine accountability that hon. Members have so accurately outlined through this short debate.

Several hon. Members have outlined some of their own personal experiences from their constituencies, and I know and accept that economic crimes not only represent a significant cost to the economy, but have real-life implications for individuals out there. That is something we must not forget about. I have seen it in my own constituency; just a few months ago I dealt with a gentleman from one of my towns, Killamarsh, who had had £20,000 taken from him in a telephone-based scam. We had to struggle to get that money back from the bank in the first place, but it should not be the responsibility of the individual, and the individual should not have to engage with their Member of Parliament, to get that money back through those processes. The money should never be taken in the first place, and we should prevent such problems before they happen.

On that basis, I accept the challenge here but, without taking anything away from the valuable and important points made today by all hon. Members, I highlight that it is important that the Government pursue a targeted and proportionate level of enforcement, focusing on achieving compliance from companies. I do not think anyone here today would disagree with that in principle. We must seek to counter financial crime, but we must also seek to protect the dynamism of the UK’s business environment.

The overwhelming majority of the UK’s 4.5 million companies contribute productively to the UK company, abide by the law and make a valuable contribution to society, and our responsibility to them is as important as the absolute requirement to crack down on the small minority who misuse the system. We must not undermine the strengths of our current systems nor overburden the law-abiding majority.

Notwithstanding that, the Government are committed to increasing the transparency of business so that those behind the abuse of companies can be identified and our law enforcement bodies can access the information to support their investigations. I know the main question today is one of timing; it is a question of how quickly we get there, and I appreciate the exhortations from hon. Members across the House. I assure them that both the Department I represent and the Government as a whole are working hard to bring forward appropriate measures as soon as we are able. We are taking it seriously, and further information will come forward on that as soon as possible.

I highlight that because it should be clear, based on things we have already done, that the intention is moving in the direction hon. Members want. Consultations were published a couple of months ago, and the Department has published responses on limited partnership reform, increasing transparency, and reforming the powers and role of Companies House—something the right hon. Member for Barking has highlighted throughout the debate. Members have seen a draft Bill to increase the transparency of overseas companies that own property in the UK, as referenced throughout the debate. As Members will know—many Members in the Chamber have been here longer than I have—by convention, the Queen’s Speech outlines the point at which the legislative programme comes forward, and we will do that in due course. I assure the House of the Government’s commitment in that regard.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The Minister is making a good and important speech. His Department is looking at a review of whistleblowing regulations and legislation. We have heard evidence from across the House that fraud now accounts for something like a third or even 40% of all crimes, and around 40% of those crimes are identified only because of the work of whistleblowers. It is widely acknowledged that whistleblower legislation is falling behind that in other countries. Does the Minister agree that we must focus on that issue in the context of this debate? Whistleblowers are key to finding the information, so that we can crack down on crimes that are facilitated within these organisations.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for highlighting that important point. Whistleblowing is a vital part of an ecosystem that works and has appropriate checks and balances. He correctly highlights the need to ensure that our frameworks are appropriate for that, and I know that Ministers responsible for that area of policy are listening to this debate and will take his points on board.

Let me take a moment or two to talk about context. Context is important because, even in a good-natured and constructive debate such as this, it is important to acknowledge some of the work that has been done, while also recognising that Members are keen for us to move further and quicker. In 2015, the Government legislated to ban bearer shares and create a public register of beneficial owners of UK companies, and that register has been a template for countries across the world. Indeed, a number of years on, we still get requests from other parts of the world about it. Since 2016 the Government have made significant changes to the way they tackle money laundering, particularly through new powers in the Criminal Finances Act 2017, which include unexplained wealth orders, new seizure and forfeiture powers for bank accounts, and new protections for the sharing of information.