Criminal Finances Bill — House of Commons, 2016-10-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I will resist the temptation to sing, rap or recite poetry and will finish well before 10 minutes to 7 My right hon. Friend makes a good point. We cannot fight modern cyber-wars with catapults. Technology changes and we need to upgrade this wholly inadequate system. We were told that that was happening; we want to know when New powers for the Serious Fraud Office are all well and good, but it needs officers with the right training. Since it was set up in 2009, it seems as though the public purse has been used to train officers in financial crime, yet we are simultaneously powerless to prevent them from falling prey to private sector poaching, so something needs to be done. There was to be a working group on the recruitment and retention of investigators—what became of that? Are some of those deficiencies to be plugged at a later stage At the moment, 27 separate bodies are responsible for asset recovery—people who investigate SARs—and they are often in the private sector and sometimes funded by the groups they regulate, so there is a mismatch. It would not be a bad idea to have an overall SAR tsar or tsarina to get some coherence. What progress is being made on the anti-corruption strategy due by the end of the year? I understand that a joint ministerial council will meet at the Foreign Office next week. Will tax issues be on the agenda? If the Minister does not know, will he have a word with his friends in the Foreign Office to find out? If it is not on the agenda, can I politely suggest that it be added urgently What are the Government doing to ensure transparency in our overseas territories and Crown dependencies? What is the plan? My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking suggested that the Government could at least set a timetable to allow them time to adjust. In the meantime, will the Government give them every support to transition their business? They have propped up this business model for a long time and they need to move away from facilitating corruption. Without action in our tax havens, the small bits of good news in the Bill will be overshadowed by the Government’s failure to act. The Government should be able to persuade their own territories to follow their lead. Members on both sides of the House paid tribute to the former Prime Minister and his ambitions in this area We need to get away from the idea that not paying tax, whether by avoidance or evasion, is a victimless crime. Countries in the developing world lose three times as much to tax havens through illicit funds and re-laundering than they gain in aid. It adds up to a trillion pounds a year and we are pumping aid into these places at the same time—it makes no sense. Given our straitened circumstances, we should be justifying every pound spent, but HMRC estimates the tax gap to be £36 billion, including £5.2 billion owed to our Exchequer from tax evasion. My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking quoted the same figures, but other interest groups say that they are conservative estimates. By definition, secret transactions and hidden money mean that we do not really know the true extent. For that £5.2 billion, we could get 42,000 full-time doctors or 54,054 nurses a year. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East pointed out, we have a poor record of recovering costs, and these things do not pay for themselves. The practices that this Bill seeks to tackle expose the dark side of globalisation, its links to terrorism, and the way global financial cross-border crime, terrorism and all these things can be done nowadays at the click of a mouse, meaning that illicit funds can fuel a golden age of money laundering. That is entirely possible and we do not want it to happen. We do not want illicit funds to finance terrorist operations, aided and abetted by financial secrecy jurisdictions of our own Governments can hold all the summits they like and people can orate good intentions, but warm words need to be matched with action. This Bill is a case of "could do better" on the Government’s report card, and I urge them to work together with us. In Committee, we will be pressing the Government on some of the issues outlined today—and more. When the opportunity for reform presents itself, the Government will surely not want to go down as having bottled it. We will not oppose this Bill on Second Reading, and we look forward to contributing constructively to its passage through Parliament.