Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Matt Hancock and Steve Barclay

Tuesday 17th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

Just yesterday, I met leaders of the NHS Staff Council, who represent trade unions under Agenda for Change, as part of our ongoing discussions on the agreement we will reach with them, which includes working together on retention and how we address some of the challenges the workforce face.

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Ind)]

May I congratulate the Secretary of State on being ahead of track to hire 50,000 more nurses this Parliament, as we committed to in the 2019 manifesto? However, can I push him by asking him where he is up to on ensuring that enough staff are trained to do clinical trials, as set out in the excellent O’Shaughnessy review, and can he give us an update of where implementation of that review is up to?

UK Anti-corruption Plan

Debate between Matt Hancock and Steve Barclay

Thursday 18th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Minister to make a statement on the Government’s anti-corruption plan.

[The Minister for Business and Enterprise (Matthew Hancock)]

I am delighted to tell the House that we are today publishing the UK’s first anti-corruption plan. The Government are doing more than ever before to tackle the blight of corruption here and around the world and the new cross-government plan sets out 60 actions for Government and partners over the year ahead. I pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), for their work on this issue.

The new anti-corruption plan sets out how we will build a better picture of how corruption affects society and the economy; strengthen our legal and operational tools and activity; enhance our law enforcement response; deny use of our financial system to those trying to abuse it; and step up efforts internationally. I will deal with those points briefly and in turn.

First, it is crucial that we know better the breadth of corruption and how it affects the economy. It is clear that corruption harms prosperity and undermines societies where it is rampant, so we are establishing a new intelligence capacity based in the National Crime Agency with a global reach to investigate and collate evidence in a single place and to make that information available to investigators, potentially worldwide. We will merge the resources currently split between the City of London police, the Met and the National Crime Agency into a new international corruption unit based in the NCA and we are considering what further funding can be directed to support and enhance this work.

We are strengthening our operational tools and the legal framework. We are currently legislating for a new offence of police corruption and operationally pooling investigators who have previously been split among difference forces and agencies. Through the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill we are leading the way on establishing the first public central registry of beneficial ownership, recording who owns companies registered in the UK. That will help law enforcement agencies to remove the corporate veil that too often is used to cover up corrupt activities.

Britain will be the first country in the EU to provide transparency to payments made by multinational companies in the extractives sector and, finally, we will step up our efforts internationally. We are working with partners around the world to build on the G8 commitments at Lough Erne to drive this agenda internationally and strengthen the global system. Britain will lead the way in her historic role of providing the secure, transparent and fair basis of law to govern how we do business, to stamp out corruption at home and abroad so that all can prosper in a truly free economy where the legitimate hard-working business cannot be undercut by the dishonest and the corrupt. For centuries, Britain has played this role and we must do so again. I commend the anti-corruption plan to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Barclay]

I thank the Minister for his statement. The plan is welcome and includes a number of welcome measures, such as action 47, which changes the legal test that applies to restraint orders. Will the Minister confirm that there are a number of notable omissions? For example, the plan does not address the introduction of unexplained wealth orders. Does he accept that 38 days to prove that a complex international transaction is corrupt is a pernicious time limit?

Does the Minister accept that the plan is silent on limited liability partnerships used as shell companies? Does it address the lack of judicial powers identified in the recent judgment from Lady Justice Gloster? The Minister mentioned resourcing, so will he confirm how many people have agreed to transfer to the new unit, given that the police do not have TUPE powers and that it has been suggested that only two of the 35 had agreed to that transfer?

Will the Minister address the fact that the plan refers to a review of the regime on suspicious activity reports, when the issue is what happens when SARs are reported? Out of the 316,000 reported, only 110 were subject to investigation by the proceeds of crime unit. Why does the plan appear silent on that issue? Will he also address issues such as beneficial ownership? The Prime Minister has given welcome leadership on beneficial ownership, but the plan seems to ignore the fact that about 45% of London property over £2 million is owned by offshore companies. It is silent about the time scale on the overseas territories, other than pushing it back to the end of 2016.





Finally, the Minister wrote a very good book—I am sure it is still available in all good bookshops—calling for much tougher sanctions against those in banks guilty of regulatory breaches. Why, when he proposed criminal sanctions in his book, does the plan stay silent on the fact that the biggest fine in the past decade, on a money laundering reporting officer, was £17,500? Was my hon. Friend’s plan not an opportunity to preach about what he wrote?

[Matthew Hancock]

That is the second time in two days that somebody has referred to my book, which I thought was long forgotten. I am delighted not to have to promote it myself and that others are doing so for me.

My hon. Friend raises a series of important points. This is the first UK anti-corruption plan that brings together actions across government. It takes significant steps forward, but nobody would say that the job is complete. Everybody would say that there is further work to do, and I look forward to working with him and other right hon. and hon. Members to do that. Ultimately, we have to balance the need for transparent and non-corrupt contracts with the fact that Britain gains great advantage around the world from having the legal system on which many, many international contracts are based. So we need to draw up the plan carefully and sensibly, but at the same time firmly.

On overseas territories, I can confirm that conversations are under way with overseas territories to ensure that progress is made, and we are indeed making good progress. On the transfer of new units, the two units in the police that have the biggest impact on corruption are in the Met and the City of London police, and both of those units will be part of the National Crime Agency. We are undertaking an additional piece of work to review how much further we need to go in the institutional arrangements. For too long all the work on anti-corruption was split between a multitude of forces and agencies. I am sure my hon. Friend would agree, as he was previously an investigator of such activity. Instead, that work is being brought together in the NCA.

On the point about the number of alleged offences taken forward, the purpose is precisely to raise that number. I hope that further action will be taken. On beneficial ownership, following the Lough Erne agreement, the clauses being considered in the other place, which went through this House in the autumn, are among the most advanced in the world in making sure that corporate transparency is the order of the day—the standard practice. We will see how those clauses bed down. I have no doubt that in years to come we will want to review the effectiveness of those clauses to make sure that they are used appropriately and that the functioning of the register works. Crucially, we must make sure that we continue to drive forward the actions in the UK that have relevance around the world to make sure that we stamp out corruption wherever we find it.

Banking Reform

Debate between Matt Hancock and Steve Barclay

Monday 29th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention, because it brings me precisely to the final thing that the Government have already proposed, and which I think is central to preventing a recurrence of the financial crash: the decision to move the powers for prudential regulation to the Bank of England and to strengthen those powers.

Having quickly welcomed the action already taken, I want to concentrate on prudential regulation. The removal of powers of prudential regulation in 1997 was central to many of the things that Members on both sides of the House have talked about. The hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), who is not in his place, spoke passionately about how his managers were telling him to lend more no matter what the customer needed. That was part of the rapid expansion of banks’ balance sheets, because there was no prudential regulation at the top of the size of those balance sheets. We also heard, from Government Members, about the rapid, uncontrolled run-up in balance sheets.

The idea of prudential regulation and having an institution exercising judgment, instead of just lots more rules-based regulation, has come of age. After all, the system before 1997, although imperfect, had prevented a run on any bank in the UK for 140 years, so it deserves some credit, and it deserves studying. So why would more discretion and judgment based in strong institutions work better than more rules? There are three key reasons. The first, as we have heard in many contributions, is that although rules can be set down in statute, statute can take a long time to change, whereas bankers can change and adapt very quickly. We have heard a lot this evening about regulatory arbitrage—another example of how financial institutions will change quickly to make the most out of whatever rules have been put in place on the ground. But the system cannot then adapt quickly.

Secondly and crucially, the system cannot adapt to innovations. We have seen massive financial innovation, especially with the development of computers over the past 30 years. However, to blame that innovation itself for the mess we are in ignores the fact that it was the lack of regulations—as my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) pointed out so eloquently, regulation is crucial to a functioning market economy—around these new developments and the attempt to regulate through explicit and specific rules, rather than the exercise of judgment, that was the problem.

[Stephen Barclay]

Is not one issue that mitigates the need for specific rules the regulator’s 11 principles, which act a bit like the 10 commandments? For example: “Principle 1: you must act with integrity. Principle 11: you must be open with the regulator. Principle 3: you must have adequate risk management.” It is inconceivable, given that those rules have legal force, that some of those catch-all principles could not be used in enforcement.

[Matthew Hancock]

They were not used, and that is the problem. A massive, heavy and expanding rulebook distracted the attention of regulators away from the big picture.

My third point about why discretion rather than rules is the best way for the future concerns the importance of the macro-economy, because we cannot separate monetary policy from banking policy. The size of banks’ balance sheets is crucial to regulating the supply of money in the economy. Having counter-cyclical rules rather than pro-cyclical capital rules, as we had under Basel II, is crucial. The exercise of judgment over a bank’s balance sheet is best done in the same place as the exercise of judgment over the macro-economy. Bringing those two things back together in one institution—the Bank of England—is a better long-term way of trying to wrestle with such difficult judgments than having them in separate organisations, which, as we heard in an earlier, eloquent speech, ended with the tripartite system, in which nobody was in charge.