Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The prominence of PSBs is important. We are ensuring that S4C gets the funding that it needs—more than £6 million last year and more than £6 million next year. We have repeatedly made it clear that we strongly support S4C, which was a great Tory invention.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

In a woeful performance before the Home Affairs Committee earlier this week, managers from Google, Twitter and Facebook admitted that they do virtually nothing proactively to reduce hate speech, extremism or child abuse from being hosted on their sites. Is it not time that we proactively pursued a policy similar to German proposals that would see social media companies penalised with large fines if they failed to take down such sites within 24 hours, or to prevent them in the first place?

[Tracey Crouch]

I saw my hon. Friend’s comments about this in the newspapers this morning, and I reassure him that the Government are determined to do everything that we can to stamp out hate crime, which has absolutely no place in society. We have some of the strongest legislation on hate crime, and we expect social media companies to respond quickly to incidents of abusive behaviour on their networks. However, there is much more that we can do. We have just announced work on an internet safety strategy, which I will take forward with other colleagues, that is aimed at making Britain the safest country in the world for children and young people online.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Solicitor General]

My hon. Friend knows that the SFO operates a model of funding that means it can be quite flexible as regards particular investigations. The important point is that we get the right people with the right specific expertise in particular types of serious fraud. Flexibility is the most important principle.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Everybody knows that there is a lot of hot money in the London high-end residential market, especially coming from Russia, and there are extensive reporting regulations on financial advisers and agents, so why have there been so few prosecutions for money laundering in this area?

[The Solicitor General]

I share my hon. Friend’s concern about this. He will be glad to know that the provisions in the Criminal Finances Bill, which I hope will become law very soon, will enhance the powers of prosecutors and investigators in going after ill-gotten gains with new measures such as unexplained wealth orders, which will help us to deal with the perpetrators of this type of fraud.