Robert Neill
Main Page: Robert Neill (Conservative - Bromley and Chislehurst)Department Debates - View all Robert Neill's debates with the Home Office
(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Kevin Hollinrake
The hon. Gentleman is right. The regulations are there but the penalties are not sufficient. The people within Danske Bank knew that they were doing wrong when they moved €200 billion out of Russia and into other parts of the world, but there was no incentive to do anything about it because they made a huge amount of money as it flew through their systems. A local manager, a mid-tier manager or even a senior executive would think, “Well, we’re making money and nobody’s going to find out, and if we are found out there will be a fine down the line and I will have gone by then anyway.” So where is the incentive to clamp down if they are going to make lots of money out of it? After all, everybody has budgets and targets to hit, and bonuses on the back of them. That is the problem: the penalties and enforcement need to be different.
Another key reason why money is washed through the UK is that we have the overseas territories, tax havens that work on the same basis of common law—Jersey, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. Money launderers do not want to pay tax on their money, so they put it through a jurisdiction with low or zero taxation. That is why the UK plays a major role in facilitating this, and also why it must play a major role in clamping down on it.
We do not do clamping down very well here, however. Our enforcement agencies have success in some regards, but they are nowhere near as successful as other jurisdictions, for example the USA, which is far more focused on this. The US has similar bribery laws to the UK, introduced in 2011. In 2020 the US fined organisations in the US £1.85 billion for bribery offences, which is more than the UK has fined in 10 years. The situation for money laundering sanctions is very similar: in 2019 the UK fined our banks £260 million in the entire year for money laundering offences, while the US fined £7.5 billion, including £2.5 billion of criminal sanctions. Almost every one of our agencies is underfunded and under-resourced in tackling this problem.
What do we need to do? My colleague the right hon. Member for Barking will talk about some of the measures, but I will focus on the key things that I think we need. We must ringfence a budget for tackling economic crime right across the piece in the UK, to see exactly how much we are spending on tackling organised crime. We need fewer agencies, too; the effort must be more consolidated so the lines of reporting are less fragmented and more direct.
Action Fraud must not just be a rebadged enterprise. It needs to be meaningful, and people need to have confidence that the offences reported to it will be dealt with. I was recently nearly scammed through WhatsApp when I thought my son had contacted me, but it was another person. I wondered whether to report it to Action Fraud, but I thought, “What’s the point? It’s not going to do anything about it.” That is why people do not report such incidents. Clearly, therefore, there are many more offences than the number reported.
The No. 1 thing we need to do is something the Government have talked about. We already have a failure to prevent offence. There is corporate criminal liability in the UK if people fail to prevent bribery in their organisation—that offence was introduced some years ago, I think in 2011—and also an offence of failure to prevent tax evasion. People cannot just stop that happening; they have to put the rules in place to stop it happening. The key thing is what they can do to stop this. They therefore put systems in their organisation to alert them to certain things happening, and they train staff that they cannot get involved in bribery or facilitate tax evasion. We need to extend that to failure to prevent economic crime.
The Government have been talking about this for some time, and the Law Commission has reported on it. It said we should introduce such an offence but probably for fraud alone, not for money laundering or things like false accounting. I think that is a big mistake. It is also very mealy-mouthed on including personal liability for directors; it says it could be added if they have the mental something—what is the word?
Kevin Hollinrake
Thank you. On that basis, only if it can be proven that the directors had a guilty mind and were actually participating in the fraud can they go to jail. That is the wrong approach, and is not what the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 said. The Act said that those who fail to prevent accidents in their workplace could go to jail, and construction deaths dropped in the following year by 90%. We need to put in place an offence such that those who fail to take reasonable steps to prevent and clamp down on fraud can go to jail, without it also being necessary to prove that they deliberately facilitated the fraud. That would make a fundamental difference.
We must support whistleblowers, too. Most of the information on these offences will come not from our enforcement agencies or investigations by regulators, but from people within the organisations. Currently, those people are not protected—
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) on securing the debate, and on the reports produced by their all-party parliamentary groups on fair business banking and on anti-corruption and responsible tax. Much of the debate so far has focused on what might be termed high-level and high-profile international and economic crime. I understand that, and I will touch on it briefly, but then I want to move on.
In relation to those very high-level matters, we definitely need to do more to tighten the rules on money laundering. I agree that the Bill that became the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 was much improved in the course of its passage, and we should certainly seek to tighten and improve the provisions of the second Bill when it comes before the House.
We also need to do more about corporate criminal responsibility and liability. The issue referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton relates to what, in law, is called the identification test. It concerns the mens rea, or guilty knowledge, of the “controlling mind and will” of a company, and the requirement to identify that controlling mind and will—a term which, in practice, has tended to mean only a very small cadre of senior managers, which makes it impossible to make the company liable for acts carried out by anyone who is other than part of that controlling mind and will, the very tight-knit group at the top who may be carrying out fraudulent acts for or on behalf of the corporate entity. The system is different in other jurisdictions, including the United States, and reform in that regard would be helpful and sensible. As the right hon. Member for Barking pointed out, it has proved easier in practice to prosecute small companies than to prosecute large ones, because the management structures of the large companies are often more diffuse, and under the current law it is therefore harder to identify those who constitute the controlling mind and will.
An extension of the duty to prevent offences would also be wise, and the Law Commission has recommended it in relation to fraud, but I think we should be open to going further. My one caveat, which I think the Law Commission flags up in its options paper which it published month, is that there is not always an exact analogy between health and safety at work offences and fraud offences. To convict for fraud, there has to be the additional element of dishonesty, either knowledge or “connivance”—a term that it often used—and, of course, dishonesty is not always a requisite element of the offences under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. A distinction may need to be drawn, and I think we have not gone as far as we could have. I am not saying that we cannot look at this, but I think it is important to bear that distinction in mind.
John Penrose
Would my hon. Friend care to venture an opinion on the Law Commission’s recommendations concerning the potential for fixing the “controlling mind” legislation and legal approach? Could that be improved sufficiently to provide a decent alternative to the “failure to prevent”, or is it fundamentally unfixable, and would such a path therefore not lead to success?
Sir Robert Neill
The Law Commission often offers a sensible way forward, and I urge the Government to adopt those recommendations and try to implement them swiftly. This involved considerable work and a great deal of expertise and advice, and I see no reason for us not to move on the “controlling mind” test quite quickly, even if we needed to look a little further at the “duty to prevent” test. Neither of those is unfixable. They offer a sensible way forward in relation to the “controlling mind” test”, and I hope the Government will act.
The other matter I want to raise in respect of larger-scale frauds is the work of the Serious Fraud Office. It certainly involves controversy, and there are some issues to which the SFO needs to respond in relation to the conduct of certain cases. I hope very much that we will see the full publication of Sir David Calvert-Smith’s report on one of those cases. On the other hand, to its credit, with a staff of 250-odd, the SFO has secured for the Consolidated Fund, through payments under deferred prosecution agreements—of which there are now 12—the recovery of some £1.6 billion. If a modest percentage of that were ringfenced, and, rather than going back to the Treasury, were held and reinvested in the budget of the SFO and allied crime-fighting agencies, that would be a massive step forward in providing it with the resources with which to deal with serious international and corporate crime.
In one of the cases that we spoke about recently when the Justice Committee visited the SFO, the disclosure material involved some 1.9 million documents. Dealing with those is a massive task. The SFO could invest in more artificial intelligence for searching documents. There are some legal complexities surrounding that, but it is doable, and is already done in commercial civil litigation. However, it is necessary to invest in it. If some of that money from the deferred prosecution agreements were ringfenced and reinvested, it would be money very well spent.
Having spoken about those large-scale matters, I hope that we will not forget that there is a great deal of “small-scale” fraud—small-scale in the global picture, that is, but very big and important to the victims of fraud. The Justice Committee recently conducted a number of hearings on fraud in the justice system. The message of the evidence we heard from Victim Support was “Do not think that fraud is a victimless crime, which is all too easy to do”. That view was supported by the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, which reported that some 74% of fraud victims were emotionally impacted by the crime. At the very least, someone will feel that they have been made an idiot of; more often, they will have lost what may be a small sum of money for a bank, but is a lot of money to them. They will feel vulnerable thereafter, almost betrayed. So this is not a victimless crime, and we should never allow it to be thought to be so. This is coming from the people who have been talked to because they have reported the offence of fraud. There are estimated to be 3.7 million incidents of fraud but according to Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services, the majority of them are not reported. We need to do a lot more on that everyday fraud.
Andy Slaughter
The hon. Gentleman talks about this subject as well as about the major frauds. I was shocked to find out that in 2020-21 fraud accounted for 39% of all crime and that the average investment fraud deprived the victim of £14,000, which is a significant sum of money to an individual. Is it part of the problem that we are not taking this seriously enough? If we were, we would no longer be relying on Action Fraud, which I thought the Government had agreed to wind up and replace with something effective.
Sir Robert Neill
It is extraordinary that fraud accounts for nearly 40% of all crime but only about 20% of police resources go into it, which is disproportionately low. The hon. Gentleman is right about the failures of Action Fraud. Every one of us will have seen that in our own constituency caseloads. It is clear from the evidence that we heard that Action Fraud is not working effectively. The stats told us that 876,000 frauds were reported through Action Fraud, CIFAS and UK Finance in 2021. On average, about seven frauds per minute are being committed. Of those 876,000, only about 58,200 were then disseminated for further investigation, and about 28,700 were passed on to the police National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, which sits behind Action Fraud. So even if someone gets through and gets anything done, only a small percentage of the cases are acted on. Ironically, for people who can get their case to court, the conviction rate is about 85%, but only a tiny percentage get to court. We have to do an awful lot more to get these cases to court in the first place, and that means much better treatment of victims and witnesses in those fraud cases.
The chair of the Bar Council, Mark Fenhalls QC, has said that
“this country has to decide whether or not it is interested in taking on the issue of fraud.”
The chief executive officer of CIFAS, Mike Haley, said it was surprising that
“there is no national strategy for fraud. There is an action plan, but it is a plan without a strategy.”
It would not be a bad thing for Ministers to upgrade the action plan into a proper full strategy and to have a Minister with overall responsibility for that action plan.
We need to look at the role of the financial institutions in high street fraud and credit card fraud. Often they are running very profitable retail credit card operations. Perhaps they could make a small investment and show willingness as responsible business people to contribute more towards anti-fraud measures. That might be regarded as a sensible and responsible type of business activity to assist with the significant costs that people have to meet.
We have to recognise that it is not just the big frauds that are international. The CPS, giving evidence to our Committee, stated that 75% of the fraud crimes that it prosecutes have an international element. That does not mean that they are Russian oligarchs or kleptocrats. It might mean that they are coming from foreign servers, for example, or they might be foreign-based scammers hitting not businesses but individuals through insurance fraud, scamming bogus products and so on, while based overseas. We need to find ways of improving our international co-operation around tracking down those matters. This all indicates that although good work is being done, it is not being done at the scale that is necessary or commensurate with the level of the problem and the harm that is done. There is the economic harm, but I stress that there is also social and personal harm, as the Committee heard. I hope we can use the upcoming opportunities to redouble these efforts, and this debate is very timely in that regard. I commend the reports from the all-party parliamentary groups, and I hope the Government will take on board the responses that we will be sending to the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office from the evidence we drew up only recently, as a spur to further and co-ordinated action. That is the most important thing.
Kevin Foster
We will set out the details in the Bill and we look forward to the debates on it, but certainly we are clear that the registrar of companies should become more of an active gatekeeper for company creation and a custodian of reliable data, including powers to check, remove or decline information submitted to it. In her contribution, the hon. Lady rightly gave the example of someone setting up a company in the name of “Donald Trump”. Clearly that was not a legitimate company being established—[Interruption.] Some hon. Members may have missed that particular example.
Some of the changes are on identity verification. In my normal role talking about immigration, we do quite a range of work on ensuring that people can validate who they are and what their status is, and we want to bring a lot of that practice into the area of company formation to remove some of the worst examples we have heard about today. I accept that many people will see that as overdue, but it needs to be done and it is something we intend to legislate on and bring forward as a key change to our enforcement structure, to ensure there are fewer opportunities to abuse the system of company registration here in the UK.
Comments have been made about the resources of the National Crime Agency. We have increased its budget year on year since 2019. Taking all NCA funding into account, its budget has increased by 32% since 2019.
In response to concerns on corporate criminal liability laws, which a number of colleagues picked up on in the debate, we have sought to establish whether there is a case for change. I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) who referred to the Law Commission and the review we asked it to undertake. As he rightly says, it sets out several options for reform; he outlined his view that he would like to see us accept them, and we are assessing them. Certainly, that is something we specifically asked the Law Commission to do because we believe it is an area that needs careful consideration.
Sir Robert Neill
I know the Minister wants to assess the options, but he will be aware that that debate has been ongoing for a number of years now, well in advance of its referral to the Law Commission. The matter has been debated in political circles and in legal and judicial circles for a great deal of time and there is a huge amount of information there, so I hope he can come to his assessment very quickly.