Anti-corruption: Beneficial Ownership Registration

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I agree with my noble friend. It is important to make the point that we would like to help developing countries to facilitate this, and we are spending money and resources doing that. DfID, for example, and the HMRC are capacity-building, and we are spending more money. We agreed to double our expenditure on that under the Addis tax initiative.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, what proportion of the illicit capital flows that my noble friend asks about end up invested in the London property market? If the Government persist in their privatisation of the Land Registry, will they undertake that no bids will be entertained from business interests that have connections with secretive jurisdictions, such as the Cayman Islands, Jersey or Delaware? Will they also undertake that any organisation that is allowed to have charge of the Land Registry will be subject to freedom of information requests, with cast-iron guarantees of full transparency and public access?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, about 100,000 properties in England and Wales out of 24 million titles are owned by foreign companies, and of those about 44,000 are in London. As I say, we will be the first country to insist on a public register of beneficial ownership by foreign companies for property and, as I said, that will apply to existing properties, not just new ones. We are leading the way in the world in opening this up to transparency.