Criminal Finances Bill

Lord Patten Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, the UK, generally with all-party support, has an excellent leadership role internationally in efforts to combat financial crime and the terrorism that all too often feeds of it. For example, landmark measures were brought forward by the Labour Government. I would pick the then Bribery Bill, introduced in another place in 2009 by Jack Straw. That was a landmark on which much later policy has been developed, helping conceptually in the lead-up to the Bill before us. That steady, all-party drumbeat of support has brought me into very happy coalition with, for example, Diane Abbott, the shadow Home Secretary in another place. One finds these coalitions spring up in the most unlikely way. I also know the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, will take me seriously when I say that I join his coalition on kleptocracy in London, not just because of the money laundering that is probably involved, but because of the devastating effect it has on the occupancy of properties in so many London boroughs. Hear, hear to everything he has said.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Dear, I welcome so many of the provisions and tools made available by the Bill, such as the new unexplained wealth orders and the developing suspicious activity reports. There is nothing for any decent, honest person, foreign or British, to worry about in these. These provisions started in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002—I spell it out in full to avoid the POCA/poker linguistic dilemma that my noble friend Lord Faulks pointed out. These have worked very well. In particular, I welcome the bringing together of public and private information sharing in a proper, public/private partnership against financial crime. This has not been noted thus far, but I think this is an international first, so the data held by UK law enforcement agencies can be brought together with that held by regulated entities in the private sector undertaken by banks and so on. This will help us in combating money laundering. It is certainly an international first and an approach that should be followed throughout in the battle against the ever mutating cybercrime, which is one of the biggest threats to international economic and indeed social peace on the globe.

That is all good macro stuff and I warmly support the Bill, as I guess my noble friend the Minister has noticed, but I would like to move from the macro to the micro picture and to a legislative dog in this context which has yet to bark, and I hope will not even whimper. I seek confirmation that there is no intention on the part of HMG to introduce provisions that would impose legislation in this or in any other way directly from Westminster on to Gibraltar. I hasten to make, as it were, a declaration of non-interest in this matter. I have no financial interests in Gibraltar and I do not intend to have any. My wife and I simply ended up there on a short holiday, but I was rather taken by the little place and that has subsequently spurred an interest in and contempt for the persistent, disgraceful and costly incursions by Spanish state vessels into our territorial waters there.

Financial services, in which, like others in this House, I have interests in and knowledge of here in the United Kingdom, have flourished in Gibraltar. I have gone into the matter in a little detail and I think that they are based on very high regulatory standards. It is my understanding that the relevant UK departments are content with the present arrangements. Indeed, back in December 2016 my right honourable friend the Prime Minister stressed this in the House of Commons following an exchange of notes between us and Gibraltar saying that we are content with the current arrangements and that the UK’s law enforcement objectives are being met. I believe that that has been confirmed by my noble friend Lady Anelay at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Setting aside the undoubted legislative can of worms that would be opened by seeking for the first time to impose legislation from Westminster, and thus setting a precedent for those who have unfriendly feelings towards that little place and therefore could use it in a malign way, I stress that a great deal has gone on lately. Gibraltar has set up a register of beneficial ownership under the terms of the fourth anti-money laundering directive. This builds on Gibraltar’s record of effectiveness in the exchange of information. Indeed, the OECD has recognised that, admittedly using a phrase that is not a ringing endorsement, in a recent review and has classed Gibraltar with the UK, the US and Germany in the top category known as—they do not like to overspeak in the OECD—“largely compliant”, so Gibraltar is there with those other countries.

I simply seek a reconfirmation from my noble friend on the Front Bench, if confirmation is needed, that HMG have no intention of allowing the provisions of this Bill to extend by default to Gibraltar with its entirely independent legislative arrangements, curious though they are. If my noble friend does not have time to address this point during her wind-up remarks, I will fully understand. She may choose to write to me and place a copy of that letter in the Library of the House.

EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (EUC Report)

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, the first time that I can recall ever hearing the term “economic migrant” was when it was used in the other place by the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd. His phrase neatly encapsulated a growing issue then for the UK and our European neighbours, but it was rather more of a challenge than a crisis. It was something new and it seemed to be in manageable numbers at the time. Fast-forward from the later 1980s, when I heard my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell, as he now is, use that phrase, to 2016, and just as the new economic normal for western Europe has become ever-low everything—low inflation, low interest rates and therefore low economic growth—the migrant issue has mutated from a border issue to a supposed economic and social existential event, in parallel with that low economic growth and therefore relatively low European capacity to deal with some of these issues because the money is not being produced by a growing economy.

The events that are now being played out in the Mediterranean Sea, with its never-ending toll of death and tragedy, appal us all. Operation Sophia, under a mandate now to be renewed, has done its best with some planes, some helicopters and some other military borrowed assets and a few ships to do a lot to save often economic migrants from death in its search and rescue tasks, which my noble friend Lord Horam referred to in his speech, as the pressure grows. I certainly do not decry that search and rescue effort; it is a vital humanitarian issue. But its law and order, border patrol activities have caught few of the organised criminals behind the sickening people-smuggling scams that we see. Why is this? It is because the intelligence needed to manage the task of dealing with them is highly underdeveloped. The European writ large has neither the people on the ground nor the writ to control the supply of this great and growing surge of people from states in economic difficulty down through Africa.

They are coming up through the very often ineffective and imperfect, if not sometimes in danger of failing, state of Libya—or, to me, what now seems to be the two almost separate blocs that reflect the way Libya is divided today between east and west, as it was back in the time of the Roman Empire with Cyrenaica to the east, centred on what is modern Benghazi, and Tripolitania to the west, centred on Tripoli. I hope I have that right. I am no classical scholar, but I see the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, in his place and he can doubtless correct me if I have my historical geography of the later Roman Empire a bit wrong. But whatever, there are flows from the east and to the west where those Roman provinces once reached deeply down into Africa. Today the flows of migrants from Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea are funnelled up towards Benghazi while those further to the west from Niger, Mali or indeed Nigeria flow towards Tripoli.

The intelligence-gathering efforts that should inform a renewed Operation Sophia mandate are in their infancy, and we must be straightforward about that. There are certainly a lot of action plans along with a blizzard of acronyms and a welter of “contact groups”, “policy cycles”, “hot spot approaches”, “thematic groups” and much more of what to me is the impenetrable language of the action plan, but not enough people there on the ground. With great respect, I sometimes see more acronyms than there are actual feet on the ground. What is needed is a much greater effort to target more aid and to anchor more people with the foundations of hope to stay at home, which most want to do, whether in Ethiopia, Sudan or Chad. I am very proud of what the UK has done in this context and I am a strong supporter of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister in the way in which he has increased our overseas aid effort and targeted it better, whether that be in Syria or in some areas down in Africa. I only wish, not to beat about the diplomatic bush too much because that is not my way, that other countries such as Germany and France, which could afford to spend more, would do so. They are not spending anything like as much as the United Kingdom and they should get on with it.

What is also needed—perhaps being even less diplomatic—is to deal with Libya itself. It is a fulcrum of instability as well as a funnel of migration of the most desperate sort, helping to damage global stability. There have been UN-type mandates within Europe in the Balkans in the past few decades and there are others presently in sub-Saharan Africa. There may soon need to be some sort of mandate offered to the Libyan coast in order to create a less penetrable land barrier with the Mediterranean to stem the flow in a way that we have not yet managed to do. There may need to be helpful European shoes in greater numbers on the ground in Libya than there are now helping to stop migrants from reaching the sea and to support the hard-working Italian and British ships in their Operation Sophia tasks, which otherwise will be with us for decades. Let us hope that the good Libyan people will soon ask for that help. My noble friend the Minister will probably not be able to answer me today—why should he when I have not given him any notice?—but have they ever asked for that kind of help? Perhaps he could write to let me know if they have and what our response has been.

As the Sophia or its successor mandate is renewed, and important though ships and other borrowed military assets are, the real challenge is for the countries of Europe, members of the EU or not, to develop not just the projection of soft power into Africa but its actual use quite deep in Africa as well as in the Middle East, to develop and sustain those intelligence-gathering activities on the sources of migration, and to develop the ability to help more people in those countries to stay put for a better life at home rather than ending up on, or more tragically in, the Mediterranean.