Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [HL]

Lord McNally Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, that speech provided the Minister with an interesting dose of realism on the range of responsibilities and the size of the problem that this Bill seeks to cover. As the noble Lord, Lord James, said with some emphasis, these things are still going on and we should consider the Bill in that light.

I advise the Minister never to start a speech by assuring the House that a Bill is just technical, and that we should therefore move along as there is nothing to see. That only stirs us up. I remember that my mother was very fond of the saying, “The more she spoke of her honour, the more I counted the spoons”. Ministers who say that a Bill is technical provoke our learned friends in particular. As has been emphasised, we want to see the Bill pass into law, but we want to examine its wider context of setting high standards and taking global leadership in the fight against corruption.

I, too, am pleased to see the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, in the Chamber. I spent some 11 years in tandem with her making this place run, when I was the leader of the Liberal Democrats and she was Chief Whip.

I take up the point made so forensically by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and warn against the overuse of secondary legislation and Henry VIII powers in this and other Bills. It is ironic that a Brexit campaign which called for the return of a supposedly lost parliamentary sovereignty has resulted in a power grab by the Executive which would have made Henry VIII blush.

I recommend to noble Lords the text of a speech given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, at King’s College London on 12 April 2016. In fact, I think that the Minister should get a copy, read it and show it to the Prime Minister, because it is a masterly analysis of the problem that we now face in abundance. In it he quotes from an earlier speech made at the Lord Mayor’s banquet for the judiciary in 2010, when he said that this increasing accretion of executive power via secondary legislation and Henry VIII powers,

“will have the inevitable consequence of yet further damaging the sovereignty of Parliament and increasing yet further the authority of the executive over the legislature … Henry VIII clauses should be confined to the dustbin of history”.

However, now Henry VIII clauses proliferate across Bill after Bill. Parliament will need to address the situation as a matter of urgency if it is not to be known as the jellyfish Parliament for lacking backbone in the face of such blatant usurping of its powers. I go back to the noble and learned Lord’s speech at King’s College. He did not give these quotes today, but this goes to the heart of it. He said:

“Since 1950, sixty-five years, some one hundred and seventy thousand statutory instruments, prepared not by Parliamentary Counsel but by government departments, exercising powers granted by legislation, have been laid before Parliament. In that time seventeen … have been rejected by one or other house”.


In essence, that is the answer to what we hear time after time from Ministers: “Of course it will come before Parliament!”. Some of it will be by the super-affirmative or affirmative procedures, but the truth is that the use of affirmative, negative and super-affirmative procedures is no check or balance. It is a sham, and one that works, as we found before. The Labour Opposition—the Official Opposition—always has the thought, “When it is our turn, if we unravel this rather nice idea that secondary legislation comes before proper parliamentary scrutiny, they’ll do it on us”. We have seen that in the past, with the Labour Front Bench backing off from confronting the Government.

I believe that, as we go into this period of legislation ahead of us, if the Government think that they can do this simply by Henry VIII clauses and secondary legislation, we will drive into a constitutional car crash. It would be wise if the Lord Speaker and the Speaker of the House of Commons could consider bringing together a committee of both Houses to look at this to devise ways to provide some parliamentary machinery to scrutinise these powers that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, so eloquently warned us against.

Much of this Bill is anchored by the work of the European Parliament. For 40 years, British politicians and the British media liked to treat that organisation as one of those funny foreign assemblies—not like the real thing. In the Bill—and in the Data Protection Bill, which I am also working on—we have evidence of just how thorough the European process of lawmaking really was. We are fortunate to have on our Benches two outstanding examples of European lawmakers in my noble friends Lady Bowles and Lady Ludford. In the Bill we will have the immense benefit of their experience. As a Minister I saw at first hand their skills in making EU legislation better, more effective and—yes, of course—in our national interest. That is real sovereignty in action—being there and being able to influence. I hope that the Minister will listen carefully to what is said as the Bill progresses.

One of my proudest moments as a Minister was when, in 2011, Ken Clarke and I were able to bring into force the previous Labour Government’s Bribery Act 2010. That was by no means a done deal. There were the usual complaints that this would lose us vast orders—it was usually implied that the French would get them if we did not. But it was a significant turning point in taking a legislative stand against the corruption of free and fair trade. It is equally important in keeping Britain at the forefront in delivering sanctions against regimes and individuals whose behaviour undermines human rights and violates established international law.

My noble friends Lady Northover and Lady Sheehan will be casting their expert eyes over the sanctions part of the Bill as regards national security and our ability to contribute fully to humanitarian and peacebuilding works. Yesterday we were briefed on the Bill by NGOs. I think that in Committee we will have to reflect on some of their concerns about the unintended consequences of the regulations on their operations.

On the brighter side, we were told by the NGOs that one of the better outcomes of tougher laws on money laundering was that international banks, particularly in Africa, were pulling out, or threatening to pull out, of countries where a laxity of controls might cause those banks to fall foul of EU or United States sanctions. The result is that many of these countries are beginning to put their own houses in order. Therefore, sanctions and anti-money laundering legislation are good for our own economic and political health, but they can have a positive impact on others, too.

However, it would be very complacent of us to imagine that everything in our own garden is rosy. We still hear voices arguing that the real Brexit will come only when Britain cuts itself loose to be a free-trading buccaneer, roving the seven seas, taking booty where it can and operating a lightly regulated, small-government regime here at home. That goes back of course to my earlier concerns. It is all very well the cuddly, lovable noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, saying, “Give me these powers and I will use them wisely for the common good”, but what happens when we find ourselves in the post-Brexit wonderland, with Jacob Rees-Mogg at the helm and John Redwood in place of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad?

That is why the Government must seize the opportunity to couple this Bill with some announcements that would provide reputational mood music demonstrating our firm commitment to fighting corruption and the money laundering that provides its lubrication. This is the front line against organised crime, terrorism, modern-day slavery, people trafficking and the abuse of state power by elites. He is not in his place now, but the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, was a very sobering and rather depressing account of how that can happen. It would, for example, be useful if, in parallel with the legislation before us, the Government could publish their cross-government anti-corruption strategy, which is now nearly a year overdue.

We need to make it clear that the UK is not a safe haven for corrupt capital and that there will be no race to the bottom when it comes to money laundering and offering a safe haven for the wealth of the world’s corrupt elite. In that respect, a key indicator of intent would be the delivery of the UK’s commitment to introduce a register of beneficial ownership of UK property. I was very pleased to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, said on that and the quotations that he gave from Transparency International’s briefing material, which I will not repeat.

Again taking up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, there is also a need to beef up the number of those with responsibility for oversight in Companies House in order to tackle these issues in the countries that have been cited. All the evidence shows that Companies House is understaffed and, on occasion, overwhelmed. Surely what is needed is an elite squad of investigators, headed by an individual who will make his or her name by cracking down on the money launderers.

As I said, we want to help the Government use this Bill to send the right messages both at home and abroad. We need to look at the money laundering provisions for weaknesses and loopholes, as so ably analysed by my noble friend Lady Bowles. We need to give clear and unambiguous guidance to our banking system which will give them comfort and confidence in operating both sanctions and money laundering regimes. We have to examine the concerns of NGOs and humanitarian agencies about unintended consequences that might make them vulnerable to falling foul of international sanctions or the law. We agree with the Minister that we need to give the legislation flexibility and adaptability so that we can respond quickly to new emergencies and circumstances, but that must not be at the expense of parliamentary scrutiny.

Those are the tasks we will face in Committee over the next few weeks. I am glad to see that the Minister is back in his place because I want to reassure him, as he sets out on these tasks, that as he well knows, “We’re the Liberal Democrats and we’re here to help him”.