National Security and Investment Bill — House of Commons, 2021-01-20
Topic: Mixed Topics
Thomas Georg John Tugendhat (Conservative, Centre-right): First, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), who has spoken very kindly about the work of the Committee that I am privileged to chair. I also pay huge tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi). He has been tireless—that word has been overused in this place, but he has been tireless—in reaching out to all Members to speak to them about the Bill and ensure that the amendments tabled are helpful and conducive to not only the public good but the national good. He has been doing that at the same time as he has been running a vaccination programme. I have to say that the Minister’s wife’s loss is the nation’s gain: she has been selfless in allowing him to slave away for our country on two very important subjects The reality is that this is a hugely important Bill, and because it is so important and such a big change for the United Kingdom, it raises huge questions that are very difficult to answer. The way that the Minister has approached this is exactly right. He started off by speaking to businesses, to our intelligence services and to our regulators to understand what exactly the threat is, how it is affecting our businesses and how it can be addressed. He has had, I hope, as much help as he possibly can from them, and I hope that the help being offered from the Select Committee that I am privileged to chair and the Committee that my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) is privileged to chair is helpful We are trying to improve what is already a good Bill and make it into an excellent one. We have had various conversations with not only the Minister but his Whips, who have been extremely helpful—I know that this is a very odd thing to say in the House—in ensuring that he is informed about the way in which we have conducted this discussion. It would not be right for me not to also thank Alice Lynch of our Committee and Nicole Kar of Linklaters, our specialist witness who has helped us through the process of writing this report I rise to speak to new clause 4, which is in my name and the names of fellow members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. We looked carefully at the Bill because, over the last two to three years that I have been chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee, much of our work has been on the threat of foreign interference in the UK. One of our earlier reports in May 2018 was entitled "Moscow’s Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK"; I believe the Minister was still on the Committee when we started that report, though he had already been promoted to greater things by the time we published it. The report touched on the way that dirty money plays into our systems and the way in which we must protect those systems Since then, we have looked at various aspects of how our foreign policy is fundamentally about keeping the British people safe. We have always focused on the interests of the UK and the interests of the people we are lucky enough to represent. We sit here representing our communities—not other communities, not business and not anybody else, but our communities and what is fundamentally in their interests. We built up, from that early report, into looking at the various ways in which money has moved around, influencing academic freedoms and changing the way in which businesses have acted. As the Minister knows, we have called out those who we feel needed to be called out. That is why I am so pleased that he is in his place and has produced this Bill, because it finally sets a process by which this Government—any Government—can look at decisions that are being taken and assess them properly.