Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Layla Moran Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 25th January 2023 Commons Chamber

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

On golden visas, I think the hon. Member will agree that the response we have had so far is unpalatable. I look forward to speaking to new clause 3, which I hope we will be able to divide on later, so that we can get to the bottom of that.

Does the hon. Member agree that the whole point of sanctions is that they are actually adhered to and that the Government do not in any way allow them and their effect to be diluted? There is the case of current Conservative party treasurer Mohamed Mansour, who owns a company called Unatrac that sells Caterpillar equipment to Russia in contravention, it would seem, of one of the sanctions we have set. Is he aware of that case, and what would he urge the Government to do about it?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. The new clause on golden visas that she mentioned is spot-on, and we are very happy to support it. I am afraid there are a number of examples of the role Russian money is playing in the Conservative party, including the one she mentioned. I do think that that has acted as a constraint on the kind of action the Government could and should have been taking for many years now, and I really hope Ministers will start to wake up to that reality.

The public need to know that the Government and parliamentarians are taking this issue very seriously indeed, and I am proud of the way that Labour Front Benchers—including my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra), who is alongside me on the Front Bench—and others have sought to work constructively with the Government to improve this legislation. Members of the Bill Committee considered the Government’s proposals in great detail during 19 sittings, covering hundreds of pages of legislation and amendments. Both the quality and the tone of the debates were of the highest standard, reflecting not just the widespread interest in these issues across the House, but the depth of knowledge and expertise in a wide range of areas. In that regard, I must pay tribute to my right hon. Friends the Members for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne). The Committee benefited greatly from their thoughtful and well-informed contributions, which I have no doubt will be shared more widely in this debate.

It is therefore profoundly disappointing that, in Committee, there was little in the way of movement from the Government, even in areas where they struggled to find fault with our amendments and new clauses. While I welcome the constructive tone that both Ministers brought to our debates in Committee, the disappointing fact remains that every single effort by Opposition parties to strengthen the Bill met with resistance from Ministers, and every Opposition amendment pressed to a vote was defeated. As a result, the Committee stage amounted to little more than a litany of missed opportunities, forcing us to return to these arguments once again in this debate, and no doubt we will have to do so during the Bill’s remaining stages.

That point is illustrated by the first amendment on today’s selection list, Government new clause 14 on information-sharing powers. The new clause seeks to expand access to information relevant to economic crime enforcement efforts, but focuses only on the Law Society and

“any other approved regulators specified by the Lord Chancellor”.

Put simply, local authorities need these powers, too. Tackling economic crime is a huge challenge for councils due to the lack of licence they have to act on their own intelligence about crime in their local areas.

Councils want to play their part in cracking down on illicit wealth as it manifests itself in their areas. For instance, I have heard at first hand from Westminster City Council how it is battling a growing number of shop fronts—so-called American candy stores—on Oxford Street in particular, that are being used to channel illicit finance, but the process for taking meaningful action against these illegal practices is simply too slow, and as a result it is a gift to the criminals. Disappointingly, following opposition from Ministers to amendments we tabled in Committee that sought to expand powers for local authorities to enforce economic crime laws, there are still no specific provisions to enhance the ability of councils to act.

Moving on to the many important amendments tabled by Front and Back Benchers on both sides of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill again raises the issue of strategic lawsuits against public participation—or, as they are commonly known, SLAPPs. This has, of course, been a deeply troubling issue for a very long time. SLAPPs are defined as

“a recognisable and pernicious form of litigation which seeks to silence, intimidate, and harass opponents”,

and they

“are designed to silence criticism and investigation conducted in the public interest.”

Those are not my words, but the Government’s own definition. Others refer to this practice as lawfare.

We have in the past seen this practice used by the lawyers of Russian oligarchs against investigative journalists seeking to uncover corruption, but we now know that these tactics have also been used by not one, but two Conservative party chairmen in recent years. In March 2019, I wrote to the right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) when he was chair of the Conservative party with my concerns regarding the origins of a £1.8 million donation from Ehud Sheleg, who was then the treasurer of the Conservative party, to the Conservative party. I was sent a reply by the right hon. Member threatening to sue me for libel. He might even have got away with it had one of Mr Sheleg’s donations not later been flagged by Barclays bank to the National Crime Agency because, in its view, it originated not from Mr Sheleg’s bank account, but from the bank account of his father-in-law, a former pro-Putin Russian politician. That is lawfare in action.

But there is more—this time from representatives of the current Conservative chair. Members may have heard his name, as he has been in the news quite a bit recently. In July 2022, Dan Neidle, a former head of tax at Clifford Chance who now runs Tax Policy Associates, accused the then Chancellor of the Exchequer of providing unsatisfactory answers about his tax affairs. What happened next? Mr Neidle received a letter from the law firm Osborne Clarke, representing the right hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), demanding that he withdraw his claims. That was a truly audacious approach and move, one might say, given what we now know about the former Chancellor’s tax returns. The bottom line is that we have a Government who claim to be committed to tackling SLAPPs, while Ministers are actively using the practice to their own benefit. It is little wonder that legislative progress has been somewhat sluggish, and that the speed of action on the part of the Government does not reflect the urgency and gravity of the issue.

New clauses 1 and 2, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, would provide a much-needed shot in the arm to efforts to resolve the endemic use of SLAPPs in British courtrooms. New clause 21, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking with cross-party support, addresses the related issue of costs orders, which clearly form part of the legal architecture that is all too easily exploited by criminals to exert a chilling effect on critics and journalists reporting in the public interest. New clause 7, tabled by the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson), would incorporate much-needed protections for whistleblowers into the Bill. All of those Back-Bench amendments have the wholehearted 100% support of the Opposition.

After months of consultation on SLAPPs, the Ministry of Justice published a response, which confirmed that

“the Government intends to pursue legislative reform at the earliest opportunity.”

That was back in July last year. If there has been any meaningful progress since that time, it has not been apparent to me, to my right hon. and hon. Friends or to any other Members who have signed these new clauses, so I ask the Minister: how much longer will it take for the Government to act decisively on this issue?

In new clause 3, as has been mentioned, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) raises the important issue of the tier 1 investor—or golden visa—scheme, which was closed down last year amid much ignominy arising from its extensive use by Russian oligarchs and other kleptocrats. In April last year, I wrote to the then Home Secretary to call for the publication of the Government’s internal review of the scheme without delay. In that letter I said:

“It is simply not enough that the scheme is now closed and a small number of oligarchs sanctioned; politicians and the public alike must be able to understand the findings of the report and learn the lessons.”

Here we are more than nine months later, and that argument still holds true. It is deeply regrettable that the Home Secretary is refusing to publish the report in full.

New clauses 4, 5 and 6 on corporate criminal liability point to another of the Government’s missed opportunities. There is a well-established and proud tradition of groundbreaking UK law on holding company executives to account for misdeeds committed in their names, or in the names of corporations they are responsible for running. A precedent was set by the Bribery Act 2010, which was passed by the last Labour Government. The Government built on that example in the Criminal Finances Act 2017 by introducing new corporate criminal offences related to failures to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion both in the UK and overseas. Extending those “failure to prevent” offences to a wider range of economic crimes is the logical and natural next step. New clause 40 provides a starting point for reforming the law in that area, and would require the Secretary of State to publish a report, setting out the various options by which a new offence might be introduced. New clauses 4 to 6 would go further still, by taking forward specific proposals within the Bill. The Opposition are more than happy to support those measures, and I pay tribute to the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) and the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) for their leadership on this important issue.

Even as we support these reforms, it is important to remind ourselves that new laws will not necessarily be game changers in themselves. These laws, like any others, will be only as useful as the willingness and ability of this or any future Government to enforce them. Legislation without implementation is not worth the paper it is written on—[Interruption.] The Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) is nodding, because we heard that from him frequently in Committee.

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I do not intend to press the new clause to a vote, but I note that the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton, intervened on Second Reading to express his wish for whistleblower provisions to be introduced to the Bill. By supporting the new clause, the Government would be doing exactly that, and I hope that they will feel able to do so.

[Layla Moran]

I rise to speak to the Liberal Democrat new clauses tabled in my name, with a particular focus on new clauses 3, 30, 31 and 39. Before I come to those new clauses, I put on the record my support and thanks for the many varied new clauses that we have been discussing, including those tabled by the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson), the right hon. Members for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) and many others.

In their breadth and depth, those new clauses reflect my own somewhat conflicted feelings about where we are with the Bill. On the one hand, it is very clear that we are much further on than a year ago, which is surely a good thing. That has come off the back of strong cross-party working, and I echo what the right hon. Member for Barking said earlier about that restoring faith in the democratic process. If only our constituents could see that we do work together and that it results in positive things.

However, it is also fair to say that we still have much to do. I know that those are not just my thoughts, because they have also been expressed by the former Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), who is now the Minister for Security. Indeed, in a sense, he and others are the great hope—the men on the inside who we hope are going to push much of what we want to see. I hope that they are hearing yet again in this debate, and in the hopefully very brief Third Reading debate later, just how much further we want to go. Notwithstanding that positive movement in the right direction, I am worried that we have started to back-pedal in some areas.

One of those areas is golden visas, which new clause 3 would address. Let us look at them in some detail. Tier 1 investor visas were the “blind eye turned” route straight into the UK that was used and abused by so many of Putin’s cronies, not to mention kleptocrats from other regimes. They were a golden ticket—quite literally—to come to the UK and launder money with barely any scrutiny or transparency. Recognising that, the then Conservative Home Secretary instituted and launched a review, and the promise was that the findings would be published. For a long time, I—and others, I am sure—had been tabling and asking questions of the Home Office to show that we had not forgotten and that the delay was inexcusable.

So imagine my delight when, the week before last, Members saw a written ministerial statement in the name of the Home Secretary entitled “The Tier 1 (Investor) route: Review of operation between 30 June 2008 and 6 April 2015”. My heart leapt for joy. Finally, five years on, were we going to get the answers that we sought to questions such as: to what extent had Putin’s cronies managed to embed themselves into the UK economy or even into the upper echelons of British society, and I include in that politics? How many of the golden visas issued went to Putin’s cronies or their family members? What other countries were these visa holders from? Crucially, where are these people now? How many of them are still in the UK? How many of them have acquired citizenship, and what have the Government done about that?

Given that we waited five years, and given that the Government and successive Ministers had promised from the Dispatch Box that we would get some or all of those answers, we were entitled to a substantive response. When the review was published, my heart sank, because instead of what they had promised, the Government published what they termed a “summary” of the recommendations—not even the actual recommendations themselves, but a summary. Furthermore, the summary frankly told us nothing that we did not already know. It is galling that we still do not know how many people have exploited this system. The statement did not even give us a number or a rough ballpark figure for golden visa holders who had been identified as a risk. The Government admitted that they had identified a “small minority”, but given that 6,000 visa holders were being reviewed—a figure that, by the way, we already knew before the publication of the statement—what is the figure for that small minority? Is it in the tens, hundreds or thousands? I think that anything under 3,000 would still qualify, so what is it?

We know that 10 oligarchs who were sanctioned held golden visas. In March, Liberal Democrat colleagues in the other place found out it was eight—presumably the difference is that we have sanctioned more people since then, so the number of people on the list who are sanctioned increases, and I can understand that, although confirmation would be helpful. That shows the Government can be specific when they want to be, so why can they not be specific on this? The statement does not say very much about how many acquired British citizenship, what nationality they were or what will happen to them now, beyond very broad generalities.

Furthermore, the bit that worries me most is that in the words of the Home Office, this written statement was its “final response”. Following my point of order that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, graciously answered in the House on the day of the statement’s publication, I wrote again to the Home Office to ask, “When are you going to do this? Why have you done this?” It said that was its substantive response, and

“we will not be commenting further”.

I sincerely hope, especially given the comments that the Minister has made in the past, that he will do the House the courtesy of giving us an answer or explanation for what on earth happened here. I seem to remember—it might even have been in the first week after his being appointed, and we were all very excited about that—that he confirmed from the Dispatch Box that the information would be released, and then it was in written statements later that the tone and the words changed. What happened? We deserve to know the answers.

I am afraid to say that from where I sit, the whole thing stinks. It undermines much of the good work we are doing here to try to get transparency. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. After years of the Government saying that they would do this, for them to back-pedal stinks of a cover-up. I am not accusing the Minister of doing that, but I think we can legitimately suggest that it could be perceived that way, and that undermines everything else we are doing. I sincerely hope, should we be allowed to divide on the new clause, that Members will come with us through the Lobby and do what the Government said they would do in the first place.

[Alison Thewliss]

The hon. Lady is making some excellent points about the golden visas. Does she find the lack of curiosity from the Government about these golden visa holders and what they have been up to as remarkable as I do, when compared with some of the difficulties that our constituents have in asking for something as simple as a visitor visa to have their granny come over and visit from Iran?

[Layla Moran]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point, which is well made. The thing is that the Government were curious, and they did this review, which is sitting there. That is clear—the one thing that the written statement confirmed was that a review had been done and recommendations had come from it, but all we got was a summary of the recommendations. What I take from that is that they were curious and they found out, but now they do not want to tell us. What on earth happened? It is not a good look.

To move on from golden visas, we desperately need to see more action in a number of other areas to ensure that we properly tackle economic crime, particularly by kleptocrats. It is right that we focus on Russians, but it is worth saying that the Bill will apply to many other flavours of kleptocrats and bad people. As other hon. Members have said, this could be our last chance for many years to get this right, so we should consider how else it might apply. Last year, for example, Hong Kong Watch highlighted concerns about the dirty money that Hong Kong officials had gained through corruption and that has now been spent by the families of officials in the UK, including on property. I raised those concerns at the time and I will continue to press Ministers on them.

I tabled new clause 30, about Iran, to show how important it is to focus not on a single country, but anywhere there are human rights abuses. Anoosheh Ashoori made the point that

“there are a large number of children and relatives of the regime that, like the Russian oligarchs, like living the high life here and have assets here.”

Why are we not pursuing them? The new clause asks the Government to use existing legislation to do an audit and report back to Parliament. We should apply the Bill to as many places as it can be effective.

All that takes resourcing—a familiar refrain in the House—which is addressed by new clause 31. Frankly, resourcing is a lacuna in this Bill and its predecessor. I was encouraged by the number of amendments on establishing an economic crime fighting fund, which shows that it is clearly the shared will of hon. Members on both sides of the House that we put the resourcing and money behind this legislation to ensure that it is done properly. The Liberal Democrats wholeheartedly share that commitment. I say to the Minister that that money would not be frittered away; it would be an investment, because if we fund the agencies properly, they will start to bring the money back in. We know the exorbitant amount that we think we are losing to economic crime, so any investment in getting some of that money back would surely be good.

In conclusion, I urge Ministers to take note of the willingness of hon. Members on both sides of the House to act, and to take heart from it. There is much more to be done. I hope that the Bill is the next chapter, but not the last, in the House’s fight against economic crime in this country. I sincerely hope that Ministers will continue to work with us in our common aim of bringing about transparency and light to tackle this once and for all, so that we are never again left in this embarrassing position.

[Mr Djanogly]

I rise to speak to new clause 23, in my name and those of the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and 17 other hon. Members on both sides of the House, for whose support I am grateful. This comprehensive Bill is significant in its scope and its intention to counter fraud, which is wholly welcome, but new clause 23 speaks to its lack of focus on the proceeds of economic crime, which are the proceeds resulting from acts committed in the UK and overseas.

Such proceeds have circulated in the national economy, largely unimpeded, for too long, and a host of existing limitations and issues, such as the lack of proper financing for related law enforcement bodies, which has been much discussed over the last two days, have a compounding negative effect. Unfortunately, those limitations are all too frequently at the expense of and to the detriment of hard-working and honest taxpayers in all our constituencies—not least mine—and those who often stand to benefit are the criminals and those sanctioned for reasons related to foreign affairs. Tackling that issue is the primary motivation behind the new clause.

More broadly, like-minded countries are increasingly focusing on this area, including our fellow parliamentarians in Canada. In June last year, they made technical yet significant changes to their economic sanctions legislation, including the Sergei Magnitsky law regime. Effectively, those changes allow existing sanctions for freezing assets to be converted into orders for the seizure of those assets. Similar measures are being considered by the European Commission, in other European capitals such as Tallinn, and in the United States. Unless our regulatory measures vis-à-vis the proceeds of economic crime are reviewed and strengthened, the UK risks falling behind, which I believe would be both morally and politically unpalatable.

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[Liam Byrne]

It is a pleasure to speak to new clauses 1 and 2 in my name and those of many others, and it is a pleasure to follow so many excellent contributions to the debate. I hope it has become clear that there is a wide and deep cross-party consensus about the need to take this overdue Bill and repower it with not only good laws but proper resourcing so that we can begin to ensure that economic criminals in this country are put under rather more pressure.

A lot is in a name, and the Bill’s name is the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. As the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) pointed out, what is crucial to ensuring the corporate transparency we need to police economic crime is information. Much of that information comes from whistleblowers and, crucially, from courageous journalists who are prepared to take tremendous risks and go to tremendous lengths to pursue the truth, publish the truth and hold the guilty to account.

The challenge we have is that we know we cannot police economic crime without such transparency, but that old advice to journalists to follow the money in pursuit of the truth is becoming almost impossible because our courts—English courts, London courts, which were sanctuaries for justice for 1,000 years—are becoming the strike point of choice for oligarchs around the world to intimidate, to cow and to deter journalists from publishing the truth with the threat of sky-high legal costs. My friend the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not in his place, and I, together with the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), have been pushing this argument for almost a year. Yesterday, the hon. Member for Isle of Wight presented to the House a first-class private Member’s Bill, which I was proud to sign. I commend the Minister for the work that he did when he was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee on ensuring that the cancer of strategic legal action against public participants is something that we know about and are collectively determined to act on.

Within the sub judice rules and exemptions that govern the debate, I can talk about some of the evidence that we now have on the record. There are now so many cases that it has become clear that there is a playbook for oligarchs. It is a playbook that all of them know and all of them follow. It is a playbook that is now predictable, and it is a playbook that we must draw to a close. We could draw it to a close this afternoon by agreeing to the amendments that we have tabled with cross-party support.

The first step in the playbook is to target the individual. Do not target the company, because companies are strong and individuals are weak. That is exactly why Arron Banks went for Carole Cadwalladr. He did not want to go for The Guardian or the Scott Trust; he wanted to go for an individual journalist. That is exactly why Prigozhin, as we now learn, decided to target Eliot Higgins and not Bellingcat, because of course an individual is always more vulnerable than a corporate organisation. In most of these cases, we see an oligarch taking aim fair and square at an individual and not the corporate organisation behind them to maximise the power of intimidation.

Secondly, having identified the individual, the task is to maximise the intimidation. Let us look at what Tom Burgis had to go through when he was writing his book about the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. The bad guys whom he was trying to expose actually went to the lengths of tapping his phone and bugging him. They must have done—that was the only way in which their investigators could turn up to a secret meeting that he was having with former Government officials in a car park. Those are the lengths that these people will go to.

Thirdly, there is the business of exaggerating the claims: taking some aside in a bit of written material and exaggerating it ridiculously to try to multiply legal costs. We saw that in particular with Mr Abramovich in his case against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins. It was a ridiculously exaggerated claim. Of course, the objective for Mr Abramovich was not to win his case. All he sought to do was maximise the legal costs for HarperCollins and Catherine Belton.

We see that now in a case in the Royal Courts of Justice, which I will not name but which I sat through a couple of weeks ago. That case is so thin. It entails an oligarch basically trying to claim that a number of emails that have been sent are in effect tantamount to a publication. Even though he is unable to name and specify the harm that has been done, he is seeking to bring a case for defamation. It is the flimsiest of cases anyone could imagine, yet hundreds of thousands of pounds have now been racked up in legal costs in an attempt to intimidate someone out of telling the truth.

Step four is to co-ordinate with others, which we saw in particular with Mr Abramovich, who decided to round up a number of his old mates to try to bring some kind of collective action—not just in this country, by the way, but in other countries such as Australia. That was a way to double the legal costs and maximise the pain against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins.

Then we have the attempts to rack up costs even though the grounds may be as flimsy as anything. Forensic News, for example, is being sued by Walter Soriano. Forensic News has a total of 12 subscribers in this country, yet Walter Soriano has been allowed to prosecute the case because of those 12 subscribers. Why could he possibly be doing that? Is it, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden described, because our legal costs are so high that the pain can be maximised by bringing a case here?

We see the same in the case referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) of the former rulers of Kazakhstan, who have brought a SLAPPs case against the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and openDemocracy. That was because openDemocracy had the temerity to expose the $8 billion siphoned off through Jusan Technologies, which is somehow now claiming that its economic interests in the UK have been damaged and therefore it is entitled to bring a case in the Royal Courts of Justice. As a result, openDemocracy and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism are forking out thousands of pounds to defend themselves against this onslaught.

The situation we now have in this country is so appalling that, as we heard in the urgent question this afternoon, we have the spectacle of a Russian warlord being licensed by His Majesty’s Treasury to fly his lawyers to London to polish a case to sue an English journalist in an English court in order to undermine the sanctions this country has imposed on him. That is how ridiculous, corroded and broken our system has become. An exemption was licensed by a servant of the Crown to spend thousands of pounds flying lawyers to service the needs of the head of the Wagner Group in St Petersburg and to refine a lawfare case in an English court.

[Layla Moran]

The right hon. Member is making his point powerfully. Does he not agree that they are laughing at us, surely? We impose sanctions, yet this still happens. We are talking about the head of the Wagner Group—a group that is operational in many countries across the world. Are we seriously meant to believe that he had no access to money in any other jurisdiction anywhere else in the world—that he had to access his British pounds in order to instruct lawyers to do exactly as the right hon. Member has described? The whole thing is farcical, is it not?

[Liam Byrne]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Here we are, licensing a warlord to draw down funds and move them into the NatWest bank account of a London law firm to prosecute a case that undermines the sanctions we imposed on that warlord in the first place.

Let us briefly go through the timeline of the case because it is so important and illustrative of just how broken the system has become.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Layla Moran Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 13th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

I am very pleased that we are taking this action now. I take on board the point that this has been a long-standing matter that Members and Administrations have been talking about for some time. There has been progress over several years. We have the National Economic Crime Centre and new legislation, so there are greater powers, but I am focused on ensuring that the reforms in the Bill are implemented as quickly as possible. On reforms to Companies House, we seek to ensure that the level of change is balanced to avoid causing any confusion for legitimate customers and to ensure effective implementation. So yes, speed is essential, but not at the expense of undue disruption.

Some of the action we have already undertaken includes being the first G20 country to establish, in 2016, a public register of domestic company beneficial ownership; the publication of the economic crime plan in 2019 and the progress made against it; and establishing, as I said to the hon. Lady, the National Economic Crime Centre and the combating kleptocracy cell in the National Crime Agency. The Bill is just one component of a wider Government approach to tackling economic crime, including fraud. It sits alongside the National Security Bill and the Online Safety Bill, and the forthcoming second economic crime plan and fraud strategy.

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

One of the areas this place will struggle to scrutinise is golden visas. It has now been four years since that review was commissioned. We understand it is ready, yet we have not seen it to be able to scrutinise it and hold the Government to account on it. Will the right hon. and learned Lady be the Home Secretary who finally releases that review?

[Suella Braverman]

When it comes to golden visas, I was very proud of the action the Government took in relation to Russian individuals following the invasion, where we stopped the sale of golden visas to particular individuals—

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

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), who has championed these matters for an incredibly long time, along with so many other hon. Members. It is always an honour to take part in such debates because it feels as if it is Parliament pushing Government to go faster, further and deeper.

I do not suspect that economic crime Bill 2 will be any different from economic crime Bill 1. We all welcome the fact that we are here, finally, but we all have a “but”, which is that we wish to do more. Certainly, the speeches so far indicate that the spirit with which we approached economic crime Bill 1 lives proudly within us. We achieved quite a lot in that and I hope that economic crime Bill 2 will be equally as fruitful.

In some ways, I hope it will be the last economic crime Bill, because I hope we can get it done properly this time. In economic crime Bill 1 we kept being told, “Well, don’t worry about that. We are going to put it to one side. It’s a bit complicated. We need to go away and look it, and then we will come back and sort it in economic crime Bill 2.” When we picked up our copies of economic crime Bill 2 and saw that it was nice and hefty, I thought, “This is good.” Then I looked at it and, I am afraid to say, I was quite disappointed. There was a lot that was mentioned, both from the Dispatch Box and in private with Ministers, that we thought we were going to tackle this time, and it simply is not there.

That frustration leads us all to want to push the Government to go further. There is also the deep frustration that it has taken a war to get to this point. I see bombing in Kyiv, Crimea and elsewhere, and I have a Ukrainian guest living with me who feels these things very deeply. Every time I see that, in the back of my mind I think, how much of the money that has gone into Putin’s coffers to help pay for what is being done to her and her family came through our economic system? How shameful that there is that direct link. We know that link is there because that is what caused us to act as quickly as we did with economic crime Bill 1. I know there is that feeling of frustration in all parts of the House and that we want to tackle the issues as comprehensively and finally as we can, this time.

In common with other hon. Members, I welcome the measures in the Bill, in particular the reform of Companies House and Scottish limited partnerships, which are significant steps forward. We have not even had a framework to deal properly with many parts of economic crime. However, even if we have a legal framework for something, we still have to be realistic. We have a legal framework for burglary, muggings and all sorts, but there still needs to be adequate resourcing for the enforcement agency. In that case, the enforcement agency is the police but with economic crime there are 22 different agencies that are meant to do that, in particular the National Crime Agency. The funding for those agencies is falling, not increasing. If we are serious about tackling economic crime, there needs to be a commitment of money to the agencies that are the force behind those warm words from the Government. When the Home Secretary was questioned on that earlier, she gave very woolly answers.



As the Bill progresses through the House in the next few weeks, I am hoping to hear the Government say that they know how much money they need to do the job they have to do. The reasons for doing it are entirely in our self-interest. There is not just the geopolitical reason that I described—the shame that money flowing through our systems is in any way funding nefarious purposes—but the fact that HMRC has something to gain. If we can get our hands on some of that money and find ways to divert it, we can find ways to spend it better, away from the criminals. That is surely in the taxpayer’s interest.

As was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), if we want to be seen as a good place to do business, we cannot allow ourselves to be a country that accepts this money. It taints all businesses—the good ones with the bad—that are deciding to trade in our financial markets. It is in our gift to make this country the best and safest place in the world to do business. It is in our own self-interest to tackle corruption. It is not just about the war; there are more far-reaching consequences.

I want to draw the Minister’s attention to a few areas now so that he has plenty of time to work on them before we get to Committee and the Bill goes through its next few stages before eventually reaching the other place. First, and most importantly, we need to start with the provisions of the first economic crime Act and look again the register of beneficial ownership. While it has now come into force, if I was an enabler wanting to make a mint from my oligarchs, it would be really easy for me to tell them how I would get around the new legislation. All I would have to do is transfer the entity into one of my relatives’ names, or, instead of having four people registered as beneficial owners, I would just need a fifth, and all of a sudden the problem would disappear. Those are two simple examples of how people can get around that register. Everyone recognises that economic crime Act 1 happened quickly, but given the time that we have had to properly scrutinise and think about these matters, I ask the Minister to consider amendments that would improve it. There is a small part of the Bill where the Government have started to do that for the register, so such amendments would be in scope. I therefore urge him to consider further amendments to that end.

My second question, which I posed to the Home Secretary, is about golden visas. We have heard absolutely nothing about them. It is not enough to say, “We’ve put a freeze on them and we’re not giving out any more.” The fact is, we did give them out. She clearly misspoke when she said that we sold them—that was rightly picked up on—but it is quite an interesting way of looking at it. Actually, many of the people who “bought” them will have seen it that way. There would have been an exchange. At the time, the idea was, “If you invest in this country, you get something back,” and in this case it was citizenship. Other countries do that, too. However, we know that golden visas were being used as a way essentially to whitewash people who should never have been given the right to reside here, let alone passports or anything else, and unless we understand fully the extent to which they were used, how and by whom, this place cannot hold the Government to account for what they are trying to achieve with the Bill.

We are in a perverse situation. We understand that the Minister has access to that review—it has been done, it is finished, and it is sitting there on Ministers’ desks—but Parliament has not seen it. That is unacceptable. At the Dispatch Box, the Minister should not say that he will look at it, as the Home Secretary did. I do not want her to look at it—I want to look at it. I want all hon. Members to be able to look at it. The Government should publish it so that we can see it. On economic crime, the slogan for all of us must now be “Better out than in”.

The third thing that I want to raise, as several hon. Members have, is the Law Commission’s look at the “failure to prevent” offence. While I was sat down I searched for that, because the pace has been so glacial that wanted to remind myself of the phases that it has already gone through. If I remember rightly, it was back in 2016, before I entered this place, that David Cameron mentioned it as part of his anti-corruption plan—in fact, I think he first mooted it in an article in The Guardian —and nothing happened. After having done a consultation announced in 2016, the Law Commission reported back in June. So we have been talking about the failure to prevent for five or six years.

The point made first by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and then by the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) was that if we put the onus on the entities to prevent economic crime in the first place, that would be hugely powerful and speak to all of our concerns about the lack of resource for the National Crime Agency and the other agencies that are meant to enforce this area. That is really neat. Actually, it would be even better, because by putting the onus on the entities themselves, it would not have to cost the Government that much.

[Peter Grant]

What does it say about the Government’s priorities if they have taken six years and not brought in failure to prevent legislation for economic crime but have managed to bring in failure to prevent legislation that fines companies tens of thousands of pounds if they unintentionally give a job to somebody who under immigration law is not entitled to be here? Is there a question of priorities that needs to be looked at?

--- Later in debate ---

[Layla Moran]

I agree with the hon. Member. It needs to be done for the cost to the economy alone, but also for the personal cost to families and individuals, which we have heard about. Economic crime sounds like something that is not personal and does not affect actual people, but that is not true. Every time that we turn a blind eye, look the other way or say “It is too difficult,” we are doing our constituents a disservice.

The final thing that we need to grapple with, which we have spoken about over and over again, is the enablers. Firms of accountants and lawyers are used to help those with the deepest pockets to circumvent the very heart of what we are trying to achieve in this place. We need only listen to what Catherine Belton said to the Foreign Affairs Committee about how she has been hounded. It is not just her; there are others as well. In fact, I know that parliamentarians across the House have faced lengthy letters from lawyers whenever we have tried to raise things. We are protected by privilege, but it should never be the case that someone is afraid to speak out on what is right because they are concerned that they will be hounded by lawyers being paid by oligarchs with the very nefarious money we are trying to prevent from getting into their hands in the first place.

There is very little in the Bill that tackles the enablers. I appreciate that that may need an economic crime Bill 3, but I have heard nothing about it at all so far. I remind the Minister, if he has not looked through Hansard to see what Ministers before him have said, that previous Ministers promised we would look at the issue in some depth in economic crime Bill 2. I am sorry to say that I see very little in this Bill that goes any way to tackling the concerns raised in the speeches on the first economic crime Bill.

To conclude, I am glad we are here and talking about this, as there is so much to say. There is huge good will in all parts of this place and the other place to tackle this matter once and for all. I urge the Government not to shy away from the difficult decisions. Parliament will support them if that is what they want to do. There is a will and there is a way. Now please, Government, get on with it.

Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre

Layla Moran Excerpts

Friday 23rd September 2022 Commons Chamber

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

I am grateful to the House for allowing me another chance to raise the proposed reopening of Campsfield House immigration removal centre, after business was so mournfully changed two weeks ago.

I start by thanking the Minister for engaging with me and my office on this issue and answering my questions today. However, I am deeply disappointed that we have to debate this issue again at all. One of my first campaigns as a parliamentary candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon was the campaign to close Campsfield House. At the time, Campsfield was a detention centre for over 200 adult men facing deportation. My community fought tirelessly for over two decades to close the centre, and make no mistake: we are ready to fight again.

The Government are now planning to reopen the centre, with an expanded capacity of 400 beds at a cost of £227 million to the taxpayer. Our opposition comes primarily from concern over the welfare of the detainees, the impact that has on everyone in the community and also the cost efficiency of this plan in the immigration detention estate. It is expensive and does not achieve its aims. But most of all, it is cruel.

I want to start with detainees’ own descriptions of Campsfield. One man detained at the centre said:

“Some of us have been here for over 3 years with no prospect of removal or any evidence of future release. There is no justification whatsoever for detaining us for such a period of time. Our lives have been stalled without any hope of living a life, having a family or any future.”

Another former detainee talked about finding solace in music:

“I tried to create a kind of musical environment around me in Campsfield. It genuinely helped me so I didn’t get too depressed. It saved me from self-harm and suicide, which I saw many people try. It made me feel like I was reaching out beyond the fences. Sometimes I think it’s ok to escape reality in that kind of a place because the reality there can feel like you are living in a nightmare.”

The nightmare of immigration detention was made much worse by failures in processes and procedures. In 2013, I uncovered that a child was being held at Campsfield. A boy was held there for between two and three months. He would have been the only child in an adult-dominated, guarded facility with barbed wire fences. He would not have been allowed to go to school and he would have been unable to interact with other children or lead any sort of normal childhood. We know very little about him other than that he was between 12 and 16. I hope that all hon. Members will agree that that was and is totally unacceptable—but he was not the only one. Another boy was incorrectly identified by social services as being an adult and was held at Campsfield for 62 days. He was 16. The chief inspector of prisons said that he

“was held by mistake and should never have been detained”.

That is fine, but there is only one way to ensure that such an atrocity does not happen again at Campsfield, and that is simply not to reopen it.

Accidental child detention is not the only concern. As detainees faced unacceptable conditions, tensions often boiled over into aggression and protest. There were riots, fires and escapes. Detainees completed suicide. One asylum seeker completed suicide at Campsfield after being detained for six months and denied bail three times. He was only 18 years old.

As hon. Members might imagine, all that causes enormous distress to the local community. It is important to note that detention has an enormous effect far beyond the fences. A volunteer visitor service was set up by local people and became the wonderful organisation Asylum Welcome, which does fantastic work to support asylum seekers across Oxfordshire and plays a pivotal role in welcoming Ukrainian refugees.

One former visitor said:

“The men detained at Campsfield House were representative of a broad range of humanity—not all were angels, although most that I spoke to were very decent people. But they were all human and therefore deserving of their human rights, and none deserved to be locked away without having committed a crime”.

That is critical: most of the detainees who passed through Campsfield were true asylum seekers—they were not criminals. The Home Office claims that Campsfield is necessary to hold foreign national offenders, yet in 2017 an average of only 98 were held at Campsfield at any one time. Why do we need a 400-bed centre away from the main airports?

Immigration detention is described by the Home Office as having a “limited, but crucial role” in helping to control our borders. There are a stringent set of circumstances in which the Government have the power to detain an individual: to enable removal from the country; to establish the basis of someone’s identity or claim; and when the Home Office suspects that someone will not comply with immigration bail. The Home Office’s own guidance states:

“Detention must be used sparingly, and for the shortest period necessary.”

On the face of it, that is sensible. I make it clear to the Minister that I can see the need for a small number of detention places, very close to airports, for people to be held for an extremely short time. That is not in question. But what is happening now, with the expansion of the detention estate, starting with Campsfield, shows that there is a failure in that system.

When the chief inspector of prisons carried out a final inspection before Campsfield closed, the average length of detention was 55 days, but some men were held for “excessive periods”. The longest detention in that year was one year and five months, but we have heard from detainees who were held for more than three years. Many detainees are not held in one centre but are deported, released, or moved around the system. They are passed from one centre to another and not allowed to form relationships. An MP might advocate for them, but then they move and the MP cannot do so anymore. They do not have consistent caseworkers. That is cruel, but it is also incredibly costly.

The cost element needs to be explored. When Campsfield was open, it cost £86 a day to detain someone there, but costs have increased. In the first quarter of 2022, the average cost of holding someone in detention was £107 per day. The more individuals we detain, and the longer we keep them behind bars, the more costly it is. As the Minister may well remember, we are in a cost of living crisis. Families are struggling to afford food; pensioners cannot afford to turn their heating on. We heard this morning the Chancellor’s grand plan to tackle the economic crisis—I am sorry, but the way to solve this is not to keep detaining people at enormous cost, it is instead to invest that money in a system to improve processing times.

Taxpayers deserve a Home Office that does its job properly. Figures from the House of Commons Library reveal that the same amount of money that the Government will be spending on re-opening Campsfield could be used to fund more than 1,000 asylum caseworkers, who are desperately needed to process that backlog. Why are we not investing that money in staff? How many new caseworkers do the Government intend to bring into the system, or are they just accepting failure?

We raised concerns at the time about the welfare of those in Campsfield, but we must also understand why there has been this shift in policy. That is why this debate is so important. Campsfield was shut in 2017 off the back of the Stephen Shaw review, which concluded that the “direction of travel” for the detention estate in the UK should be “downwards”, both for reasons of welfare and for better use of public money. The Home Office agreed with that recommendation and made the decision to reduce the immigration detention estate, aiming to reduce it by almost 40%. As part of that Campsfield closed, but the Government have now changed direction and numbers are climbing to the same levels that we saw before 2019. Not only are they re-opening Campsfield, but there is another detention centre at Haslar in Hampshire, both with more beds than they had before. That is a clear, active change of policy, and we have not had an explanation for what has changed. Which recommendations in the Shaw review does the Minister now not accept?

How does that change of policy fulfil the Government’s legal obligations? There have been legal challenges on human rights grounds for those held on the detention estate, but most of those people—and this is where we must end—are not criminals. Most of those people are true asylum seekers, and 80% of those who try to claim asylum in the UK are granted asylum. When we combine the fact that there are a small number of foreign prisoners who should be detained and supported, and that 80% of those who try to claim asylum are granted asylum, I simply ask the Minister why the Government are doing this, and whether they will reverse the decision to reopen Campsfield House.

National Security Bill

Layla Moran Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why the Bill has been constructed in a sensitive manner with our agencies and partners, based on expertise and insight. This is about how the laws will be applied to individuals in specific cases, so the sensitivities must always be considered. A case-by-case approach is rightly required when it comes to the application of our laws, as well as to law enforcement and how we pursue these matters further.

The Bill brings together many measures, but I would like the Chamber to indulge me for a minute—particularly off the back of this weekend—as I pay tribute to our world-class law enforcement and intelligence agencies. We were all touched to see the numbers of people who came to London to see Her Majesty and celebrate the platinum jubilee. Our law enforcement and intelligence agencies came together, ensuring that in every aspect of our celebrations the British public were kept safe by remarkable people, who worked tirelessly; I pay tribute to them. It is their expertise that we are trying to preserve, enhance and develop through the Bill. We want to ensure that they have all the tools and protections they need to deal with this ever-changing and evolving landscape.

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

May I also pay tribute to the agencies? When I saw all those people on the Mall, I thought, “My goodness, if something had gone wrong, imagine what that would have looked like.” It was an extraordinary effort, and the Secretary of State is right to pay tribute to them. It is also right that we protect them, but protections for whistleblowers in the security agencies are missing from the Bill. When the Bill has come before the House previously, there have been efforts to provide that, including through the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). There was also the Office of the Whistleblower Bill in the House of Lords. What are the Secretary of State’s thoughts on protecting whistleblowers?

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Lady is right that the protection of whistleblowers is vital. I will be frank: we need to find the right measures and means to do that. She has highlighted the current debates and thoughts on the issue. We need to find the right balance. Whistleblowers play an integral part in these matters, and she will hear additional points on the subject later in my speech.

HM Passport Office Backlogs

Layla Moran Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who, as ever, puts his case forcefully but entirely respectfully. When there are compassionate or compelling circumstances, steps can be taken to expedite applications where appropriate. Some of the sorts of circumstances that he mentioned would potentially be eligible in that scenario. I cannot, of course, provide an explanation on the Floor of the House for his particular case, but I will take his wider point away. On the three-week target, I will ask the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), who is responsible for passports, to write to the hon. Gentleman to set out the position and let him know his thoughts on that point.

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

This issue is undoubtedly causing huge anxiety. I have a case of a new mother who, when her daughter was born, wanted to register her for a passport immediately, because she wants the support of her family, who live in Egypt. She has been up all day and night trying to get a fast-track application. She could not find one, so she put in a regular application. She then did find a fast-track application and now she has been told, having secured the fast-track application for Saturday, that if she shows up, she may not get the passport because the regular application cannot be withdrawn. We have tried everything for her. First, if she does show up, will she be able to get the passport on the fast track, and can I show the Minister the case just to make sure? Secondly, will he assure people that a common-sense approach will be taken in cases such as these and others, so that if someone finds a workaround solution, it will actually work?

[Tom Pursglove]

I would always want to see common sense shown in these matters. The hon. Lady suggests that it would be worthwhile to share the specifics of the case with me. I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to take this away and look at what we can do to assist and provide any appropriate guidance and advice.

Preventing Crime and Delivering Justice

Layla Moran Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not give way; the right hon. Lady will have a chance to speak. [Interruption.] The right hon. Lady will have an opportunity to speak shortly. [Interruption.] If I may finish my point, I may come to her.

The other factor in terms of policing is the increase in the volume of digital evidence, and a vast amount of work is taking place across policing and the CPS now looking at how we can have an end-to-end approach across the criminal justice system to assess digital evidence. Also, for the first time the criminal justice system is now going to be held to account through performance scorecards through the crime and justice taskforce and also through the MOJ as well as the Home Office.

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

I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. Is she aware, among student victims of sexual assault, of the use of gagging clauses and non-disclosure agreements in university non-contact agreements? I am in touch with various victims, particularly from Oxford university. One college, Lady Margaret Hall, has now signed a pledge to no longer use these but none of the other colleges has. Will the right hon. Lady join me and the universities Minister, the right hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), in asking other colleges to do the same, and will she consider meeting me so that I can relay to her the thoughts of victims in these cases?

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. [Interruption.] I hear calls for more legislation from Labour Members, but, frankly, they also vote against all Government legislation. The hon. Lady raises a serious point. Through the crime and justice taskforce particularly, which is a cross-Government endeavour, the Education Secretary and other parts of Government are working with the MOJ to address and tackle these issues. The CPS has an important role to play here as well. I would be delighted to meet the hon. Lady and to speak to the universities Minister about this, because it is simply not right. Frankly, some of the practices being used are immoral, because they are effectively denying victims their right to have a voice.

--- Later in debate ---

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

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a free, fair and open society in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance and conformity.

Let us take poverty first. If there was one message that the people of this country sent the Government in the recent council elections, it was that they were struggling and needed help at this time of a cost of living crisis. When we compare that message with the contents of Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech, we see a Government who are not listening to what the people are asking them to do.

This is a Government who are more interested in stoking culture wars and opening past sores than in looking forward to a future on which we can all agree. We need only look at the way in which they are attacking our human rights. Promoting human rights is at the heart of what Liberal Democrats believe: it is in the DNA of our mission. What we have seen in the Queen’s Speech, however, is a replacement of the Human Rights Act with a so-called Bill of Rights that will weaken, limit and undermine our current human rights protections. I do not think that that is what people throughout the country have asked for, and it is certainly not their priority at the moment.

Let us now put aside what is in the speech, which is underwhelming, and look at what has been missed out completely. There is no law to make misogyny a hate crime, there is no reform of the criminal justice system that has failed women and girls in particular for far too long, and there is nothing for the 4.1 million victims of fraud.

I have had personal experience of fraud recently. My official Twitter account was hacked, and I found myself looking at my online self trying to flog PlayStation 5s to my unwitting Twitter followers. Luckily none of them took it on and no one was inconvenienced, but it took an age for me to regain control of my account. When we reported the incident to Action Fraud, I eventually received a phone call from—I must say—a lovely gentleman, who told me that of his team of four who, with him, comprised the entire support network, three were off with covid and the other was on holiday. I am pretty sure that I received the call because I was an MP and we had reported it because we were worried about security concerns.

I think that this omission says a great deal about the emphasis that the Government put on online crime, which is worth £27 billion a year. The Liberal Democrats do not believe that the provision in the Online Safety Bill is sufficient, which is why we are calling for the creation of an online crime agency to tackle illegal online content and activity effectively; but the Government, I am afraid, are not listening.

It is not just new legislation that is missing. I hope that some loose ends from the last Session will be tied up in this one, and I am thinking in particular of the Vagrancy Act. There was much celebration in all parts of the House when we finally consigned that Act to history, at least in theory, because in reality it has not yet been scrapped. The Government’s public consultation closed last week. I sincerely hope that the Act will not be in force this Christmas, and that we will no longer be a country which criminalises people simply for being homeless. I look forward to truly celebrating when that happens.

My campaign began when the issue was brought to my attention by Oxford students. When they were turfed out of clubs at a late hour they would have conversations with homeless people on the streets of Oxford, which was how they discovered that the Vagrancy Act was one of the measures used by the police to move them on.

Those students have now graduated, but another campaign is being run by new students on an issue that is really troublesome. I want to raise it in my speech today, and I sincerely hope it will find its way into one of the 38 Bills. It is a campaign to stop the use of gagging clauses for university students. This applies in particular to young women, because it is mainly young women who are the victims of this, and they are being encouraged to not speak out about their experiences of sexual assault in university. The prevalence of sexual violence among young women and girls is well known, and there are doughty campaigners on this on all sides of the House.

The group It Happens Here supports survivors of sexual violence at the University of Oxford, and it urged one survivor—I will call her Lucy—to come to me with her story. She has given me permission to tell her story today, to show just how widespread this issue is. She was assaulted in her college dorm room by her ex-partner, who lives in the same college. With support from the Oxford sexual abuse and rape crisis centre, she reported the assault to the police during the Easter holidays. On returning to the university, she was terrified that her assaulter would find out that she had reported him to the police and therefore try to hurt her again. On the advice of the crisis centre, she spoke to the principal of her college about putting in place measures to protect her.

Months went by. Eventually, the college set up what is known as a no-contact agreement. This banned both students from entering each other’s accommodations and set out separate times to enter the dining hall. That sounds perfectly sensible, except that the agreement was conditional—and by the way, breach of the condition would result in expulsion—on neither party making any information about the assault, the police case or the college publicly available in any way. That is shameful. These are Lucy’s own words:

“I signed it, feeling terrified that if I didn’t agree to it he would be able to enter my accommodation without any consequence. But I was incredibly upset about the effective gag clause. I was terrified of telling absolutely anyone anything, because what if college interpreted that as ‘publicly available’? I felt I couldn’t talk to anyone, my friends or my mental health support or my GP, because of it and felt very alone.”

This is not an isolated case. It Happens Here, the group supporting victims such as Lucy, has received testimony from survivors across several different colleges who are under similar gagging orders. I am aware of young women who are my constituents who are scared to talk to me directly about this because they are fearful that it would invoke the gagging clause and that they would be expelled. They fear that they have to choose between their voice and their future. The irony of this is that in cases of sexual violence, that discrepancy of power is at the core. It is not just about sex; it is about power. These young women have gone from a situation where they were robbed of their power into another situation where that power is again taken away, this time by the college.

I want to congratulate those survivors on having the courage to come forward to It Happens Here and to congratulate Lucy on coming to me, and I would urge others to do the same. I congratulate the Oxford student union, and especially Ffion Samuels, who have been brilliant at bringing these cases forward. I am pleased to report that Lady Margaret Hall, the college that Lucy attended, has now taken the important first step of signing a pledge committing never to use these types of non-disclosure agreements in cases of sexual misconduct, harassment or bullying. For this, it should be applauded, but it is shameful that it is the only Oxbridge college to have signed such a pledge. Some other universities have done so, but these agreements are rife in many other universities across the country.

I am grateful to the Universities Minister, who has called on all colleges to sign that pledge, and also to the Home Secretary who earlier today condemned such use of gagging clauses and agreed to meet me so that I could relay more stories of these victims. But for the survivors of sexual violence, delivering justice surely begins with allowing them to tell their story. We should be helping those victims to reclaim their power. These gagging clauses in the cases of sexual misconduct do nothing to help that. In fact, they do the exact opposite. They are immoral, they have no place in modern society, and I simply urge the Minister: please can we find a way to address this in this Parliament?

Ukraine Refugee Visas

Layla Moran Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster]

The scheme is uncapped from a visa point of view. I suspect that the issue of conversations with the Treasury may be more for the next UQ about the funding that will be provided to local communities where people are sponsoring. We are clear: it is an uncapped scheme with no restrictions. If very large numbers of people want to sponsor individuals, we welcome that. One of the reasons we have gone down the path of appealing directly to the public is that it has proved, first, to deliver far more spaces much more quickly; and secondly, to be much better value for money than more traditional schemes, as, sadly, we have seen with Afghanistan. When a large number of people arrived, offers via local councils from communities did not come forward to the necessary level and therefore we ended up having to pay for people to stay in hotels.

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

I have an urgent case that I need to raise on this last day before we rise for recess. The mother has a five-year-old. She is in Italy. She is eight months pregnant. If she does not get a visa literally in the next few days, she will not be allowed to fly by her doctor. She speaks no word of Italian and is really worried about having to give birth with doctors that she cannot communicate with. Meanwhile we have a host ready and waiting for her in Oxfordshire. Will the Minister urgently take up this case and help us to get her over?

[Kevin Foster]

I am very happy to do so if the hon. Lady gives me the details after this session.

Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Layla Moran Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I thank my hon. Friend for amendment 64. He was in touch with me about it over the weekend. He is absolutely right, and we are looking at the details of that proposal.

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

As the right hon. Lady knows, the Bill provides exemptions that Secretaries of State would be able to use in order not to require an entity to be on the register. One of them relates to

“the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom”.

Many of us, across parties—and I thank Ministers for being so constructive in this regard—fear that that could drive a coach and horses through the entire legislation. Is this another amendment that the right hon. Lady is looking at, or would she care to simply accept it?

[Priti Patel]

At this stage, I am outlining the measures in the Bill. We have a Committee stage coming up, and we are considering all the details, because we absolutely must get this right and ensure that all the measures will be effective.

Overseas entities will be required to verify information regarding beneficial owners and managing officers before making an application for registering, or updating or amending information held on the register. That is very important, because the current system is out of date. We need to be able to keep the information fresh and agile, and ensure that the right checks and balances are constantly applied. They will have to provide evidence to underpin that verification, and Companies House will be able to query all information under the broader powers we will create in the second Bill. If a foreign company does not comply with the new obligations, or if it submits false filings, its managing officers can face criminal sanctions or civil sanctions. Criminal penalties in England and Wales could, depending on the offence committed, be a prison sentence of up to five years, or a fine. We are also introducing a mechanism by which financial penalties can be enforced without the need for criminal prosecution. More importantly, overseas companies will be restricted in their ability to sell or lease their land if they do not comply with the requirements.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), and I associate myself with his comments. Although, as the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) said, it has taken a war for us to get to this point, I find myself forgetting how often I go to other countries and speak to people there, or speak to family members who live abroad, who say how they look to this place for what should be best practice. Yet when it comes to tackling economic crime we have been lagging behind. The Secretary of State said that this was done speedily, and I am reminded of when I was a teacher and people used to stay up all night to do the homework I had set three weeks earlier. The Government could have done this better and sooner, and they did not, but we are here now.

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. Does she agree that actions speak louder than words? We have had an awfully long time to get this right—it goes back to 2016—so let us see some action, and action now.

[Layla Moran]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and she is right. I do not say this in any other spirit than one of wanting to help. I thank the Ministers for the ways in which they have engaged with us, and I will keep working constructively with the Government on this, because we need to get it right, and not just for the people of Ukraine. Before I came into the Chamber today, I was talking to some Russians in Russia. I cannot name them and will not do so, because if I did, it would put their lives in danger. Members will be aware that on Friday Putin put in place legislation to give them 15 years’ imprisonment for simply saying that Putin is waging a war, as opposed to an exercise or a peacekeeping mission. They describe what is happening as strict and cruel legislation designed for political oppression, and they are asking Members of this House to work with the Russian community here in the UK to get the message out through their networks and to their friends about things such as how to circumvent Putin’s internet clampdown in Russia in order to get the BBC in Russian to people on the ground. There is something that all of us can do to help those Russians who want to help us here, and who are desperate not to be tarred with the same brush.

I look forward to the Committee stage that will take place later this evening, so I shall be brief, but I would love to hear from the Minister what exactly will be in the economic crime Bill part 2, especially in relation to the Companies House reform that we seek. I also want to associate myself with what has been said about enforcement. When I asked doughty third-party groups such as Transparency International and the Royal United Services Institute why other countries—America, for instance—had managed to include far more companies and individuals on their lists, I was told, “They have fewer laws, but they enforce the hell out of them.” Can we please be a country that enforces the hell out of this and any further legislation that we might want to introduce?

We also want to ensure that the second Bill clamps down on enablers. Amendments have been tabled to that effect, but we know that stand-alone legislation will be required for this purpose. It is not just the lawyers who are involved; it is the PR firms, the accountants, the banks, and all the others who knew what they were doing. It should not be ‘a case of acting “recklessly”—there are some get-out clauses in this Bill that we need to be careful about—because those people knew or decided to turn a blind eye, and that can no longer be good enough. I appreciate that this cannot be covered in today’s Bill, but when will it be covered?

I look forward to working with the Minister in future iterations of these matters, and I especially look forward to the Committee stage, when we shall be able to discuss some of the holes in the Bill in more detail.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Scully]

No, indeed. If the right hon. Lady looks at the Panama papers, I think she will see that they cite Emma Watson as having bought a house under a shell company owing to security risks, and the Pandora papers cite a former Prime Minister of this country buying a house in Harcourt Street and ultimately saving £300,000 in stamp duty. We clearly should not support that. So we have to get the balance right. There will be legitimate reasons, and there will be people avoiding tax, which we want to stamp out, but, in repurposing these measures, we want first to ensure that we are stamping out oligarchs’ money.

[Layla Moran]

The Minister will be aware of amendment 4—we will discuss it in Committee—which asks why there is an exemption on the so-called economic wellbeing of the UK. He will be well aware that many of these oligarchs own big companies that employ thousands of people, so the exemption could be used as a loophole. Will he accept the amendment? If not, will he explain why the loophole is there in the first place? We are very confused.

[Paul Scully]

I will happily talk about that amendment in Committee. However, I take the hon. Member’s point and the spirit in which she makes it. Perhaps we can debate that later, because I totally get what she is saying.

In respect of Russia specifically, we have swiftly implemented the strongest set of economic sanctions ever imposed against a G20 country, including the recent sanctioning of Kremlin associates Alisher Usmanov and Igor Shuvalov. That is worth a combined $19 billion with immediate effect. The Government’s new amendments will also streamline current legislation so that we can respond even more quickly.

We had discussion about funding and resource. The Government have developed a sustainable funding model, including about £400 million over the spending review period. We have announced new investment of £18 million in the next financial year and £12 million in the years after that for economic crime reforms, in addition to £63 million over the spending review period for the Companies House reforms. Since 2006-07, just under £1.2 billion of the assets recovered under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 have been returned to law enforcement agencies.

Afghanistan Policy

Layla Moran Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my hon. Friend’s local authorities. They have worked very closely with my Department in recent weeks, and I am grateful for that. He is absolutely right on the last point. These are very skilled, highly qualified people who can be our doctors and our teachers, while some of them can—dare I say it?— help through standing for local councils. They can make a huge contribution. We have settled on the funding settlement very carefully because we want to try to encourage take-up as quickly as possible. We also have the additional fund of £20 million to help those authorities that are telling us some of the issues they have with housing. We want to try to make this as easy as possible for local authorities.

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

I thank the Minister for her statement. I thank Vale of White Horse District Council and South Oxfordshire District Council, who have opened their arms and absolutely said that they will take as many as they possibly can. I am helping to support about 400 individuals at the moment, some of whom are from the Hazara Afghan community. The Minister mentioned that there were other routes available other than the resettlement scheme—because, let us face it, that is not going to be enough. There is one willing to sponsor their brother, give them a job and support them. Will the Government give a special dispensation so that that space is given to someone else equally vulnerable who may need it?

[Victoria Atkins]

I hope the hon. Lady will appreciate that I should not be making very significant decisions about immigration policy at the Dispatch Box, but I will take away her idea. We have tried, as I say, to construct this resettlement scheme alongside our existing system, going above and beyond what many countries around the world are doing. We are proud to do so and we want to encourage others to follow our lead. But of course the immigration system, as is, remains there for those who have perhaps sought asylum under the family reunion rules.

Health Measures at UK Borders

Layla Moran Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to speak of clandestine entry. First of all, rules will apply, and testing will apply, to everyone with regard to illegal entry to the United Kingdom and those seeking to claim asylum, although our policy is clear: they should be claiming asylum in the first safe country, not risking their lives by travelling by small boat or illegally being trafficked by people traffickers.

Secondly, with regard to Napier, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have covid-compliant measures in place already, in line with Public Health England. I commend our partner, Kent County Council, for the work that it is doing with us on safeguarding people at Napier, and we are going to enhance our measures even further to prevent the spread of coronavirus and protect public health. I give my hon. Friend that assurance, and I am very happy to speak to him further if he has any other questions that he would like to raise with me about Napier.

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

In the week when we have counted 100,000 dead, the Home Secretary’s announcement is, of course, welcome—better late than never—but these measures will not work without 100% compliance with isolation. Currently, only one in five people asked to self-isolate in the UK does so. Evidence that we have examined in the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus shows clearly that carrots are often very much more effective than sticks when it comes to such measures, so does she agree that if the Government ensured that there was no loss of earnings from isolation, as other countries do, that might help improve compliance with self-isolation and so cut those chains of transmission?

[Priti Patel]

It is important to put this into the context of travel and the measures and checks that we have put in place around compliance. I have already stated that Border Force is undertaking 100% checks at PCPs. Also, when it comes to carriers, there is now a carrier liability measure in place; they have that burden, and they will be given a fine if they do not check their travellers before they get on their planes, in particular. These are stringent measures with significant penalties and significant fines in place, and the carriers, which are also operational partners that we work with, are very clear about that. However, the hon. Lady is right about self-isolation. Self-isolation must take place, and that is why across Government—not just the Home Office but health and the isolation assurance service, along with the police—we are working collaboratively across the board to ensure that those measures are being adhered to and enforced.