Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2018-02-20
Topic: International Affairs
Alan James Carter Duncan (Conservative, Centre-right): As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said in his opening speech, this Bill is necessary to ensure that we can continue to use sanctions and anti-money laundering regulations to support our foreign policy and national security goals as we leave the European Union. We have had a lively and passionate Second Reading debate, but I sense that the setting up of a UK sanctions regime on our departure from the EU would appear to enjoy the broad support of this House It is often invidious in winding up a debate to pick out some speeches but not all, but forgive me, Mr Speaker, if I do that this evening, because I think the two strongest and most remarkable speeches were those of the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), with whom I worked very closely as his deputy in DFID. I appreciate the passion of the right hon. Lady; we will no doubt debate these matters at great length in Committee and on Report, and we will take on board the strength of the arguments we have heard tonight, and which, of course, we have heard before. Likewise, my right hon. Friend made an impassioned plea for humanitarian agencies to be fully considered, and I will come to that shortly. He also spoke of Magnitsky, as did many Members; I will go into more detail later, but for now I will say that this Bill has wide-ranging powers to sanction people for human rights abuse. On open registers, we share my right hon. Friend’s view on wanting to bear down on illicit money flows; as he said, the registers are open to instant access by regulatory authorities, but I quite understand his view that such action alone does not suffice I have a small point to make to my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), who asked if we could publish the anti-corruption strategy; we did so in December of last year. The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) asked why nobody has been prosecuted for export control offences; in fact, there have been 23 not just prosecutions, but convictions, for export control offences in the 10 years from 2006 to 2016, and a number of these prosecutions relate to exports to countries covered by UN and EU sanctions regimes This being a Second Reading debate, I want to dwell on a few key principles contained in the legislation, as I have no doubt that we will discuss the closer detail further in Committee. The first such issue is that of delegated powers. They are rightly coming under scrutiny in this place today. However, it is important to recognise that Ministers implement sanctions and anti-money laundering regulations by using delegated powers now, through secondary legislation under the European Communities Act 1972, and this Bill will not change that approach. In fact, in the future Parliament will have greater oversight of sanctions than it currently does, with votes needed in both Houses when the UK acts outside the requirements of the UN, and given the need to respond quickly to global events, the Government believe that regulations remain the best mechanism for implementing and amending sanctions and anti-money laundering regimes There is, however, the question of creating criminal offences, as referred to by the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), and I am confident this will be addressed before Report. We have listened to these concerns and we are working on a solution that we hope will be accepted by those who expressed them in another place. Indeed, Lord Judge, whom we have been talking to, and his colleagues did not disagree that breaches of sanctions should be criminal offences, and we will introduce amendments to fix this and address their concerns in due course On procedure, we believe we have the right balance of affirmative and negative resolutions. Regulations that implement UN regimes will be made under the negative procedure; regulations that do not implement UN sanctions regimes will be made under the made-affirmative procedure. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central talked about the ability to amend devolved legislation as being "monstrous". I think she slightly misunderstands the process here. Sanctions are a matter of foreign policy.