It is an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). His homeward commutes on Thursday evenings fill me with the utmost envy. Perhaps he would enjoy my regular seven-hour journeys up and down. However, he made a very interesting speech. Indeed, the contributions from Members on both sides of the House have been very informed and enlightening.
I do not want to take up too much time, but I want to touch briefly on some of the new clauses before I hand over to the other Front Benchers. New clauses 2, 3, 14, 15 and 4 extend the principle of corporate economic crime, which has been discussed at length today. The Bill incorporates a failure to prevent such crime, but only in relation to tax evasion. As others have said, it would appear sensible, given the current climate and the public mood, to extend that provision so that the liability reaches the tops of organisations.
I have mentioned this in the House before, but, as a lawyer who had some in-house experience working for a large retail bank, I can say with the utmost certainty that sticking one’s head above the parapet and telling the bank that it is wrong is not the course of action that is most conducive to one’s career. I did not fall foul of that myself—I avoided that particular pitfall—but I think that I probably would have done so at some future time.
I think the public would demand that the concept of corporate economic crime be extended beyond tax evasion. I think they would be surprised to learn that the bank would not be held liable for LIBOR-rigging, for instance. Of course, the individuals concerned were prosecuted under different laws, but there was no corporate criminal liability for the boards of directors or for the banks themselves. I do not think the public would thank us for a corporate economic offence that extended only to tax evasion. It is tax evasion, for goodness’ sake. I think the public would expect companies such as banks and other large organisations to be held criminally liable for something as obvious as tax evasion. It is a great shame that the Bill has not grasped the nettle. The Minister may, of course, have something miraculous to say. I suspect, however, that we are not going to have an extension of corporate economic crime, which is a real shame.
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Even if it were to come to pass, I would still have issues about some of the provisions in the failure to prevent model. If a bank can show that it had reasonable processes and protocols, that is an absolute defence. There is also a defence if, in the circumstances, it is deemed that the bank ought not to have any reasonable processes in place. I know from bitter first-hand experience of commencing litigation against banks that in the eleventh hour they will miraculously pull together volumes and volumes of training manuals, protocols and processes that seemed completely absent when the alleged offence
was being committed to convince the judge that they have all the processes necessary. Call me a cynic, but even if the failure to prevent was extended along the lines of the incorporated new clauses, I still think there is an opportunity for a bank to—to put it in colloquial terms—wriggle out of that potential responsibility.
I do not have a great deal to add to what has been said on new clause 6, which we will support. We are pleased that the Crown dependencies are not part of new clause 6. Given that I am a Scottish National party MP, it is part of my political definition that I do not want this place to legislate on places or jurisdictions where it does not have authority. We understand that there is more of a case for the overseas territories, and we will support the amendment on that basis, but the Chair of the Select Committee on Justice, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), was absolutely right to make the distinction between, for example, Gibraltar and the overseas territories. Throughout this process I have been puzzled about why Gibraltar is considered an overseas territory and not a Crown dependency; that is probably not within the Minister’s remit, but it has occurred to me over the last few months.
Transparency is key. If this Government’s policy is transparency and we all agree that transparency would facilitate a fairer banking and financial system, there ought to be no good reasons why those jurisdictions should not have public registers the same as we have. But I corroborate other Members’ views that that is the clear direction of travel. Whether or not it is right to legislate to compel jurisdictions over which we perhaps do not have authority is another question, but on the basis of transparency and the fact that I think it reflects the public mood, we will support new clause 6.
New clause 11 asks the Government to go through a consultation process to persuade and cajole the Crown dependencies to adopt legislation that, frankly, ought to be determined by their own Parliaments in their own jurisdictions. New clause 6 is easier to deal with as it deals with transparency and things we really want to get done, but new clause 11 seems to be a wish-wash of “Let’s have a chat with them,” and “Let’s see if we can persuade them to do anything,” when that really ought to be up to them, as it ought to be up to the Scottish Parliament, and up to the Welsh Parliament or whatever jurisdiction holds those powers. I therefore would have constitutional jurisdictional problems with new clause 11, but, again, I accept the basis behind it. However, I think we will find that as time goes on the overseas territories and Crown dependencies will be willing to have that conversation about the effectiveness of their registers.
We have tabled three new clauses in this group. The first is on Scottish limited partnerships, and I have nothing to add to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin), who is no longer in his place as he had to go to the second meeting of the rather popular Committee he mentioned. He articulated the case very well. It would be our intention to press new clause 10 to a vote this evening, but that will turn completely on what the Minister has to say when summing up—so, no pressure, and we look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say, or we will, without question, press new clause 10 to a vote.
New clause 19 gets to the heart of the issue surrounding criminal finances: what I would describe as the responsibility-shedding, banking sales-driven culture that we have in the UK. The banks are the facilitators of criminal finance; they facilitate all the wrongdoing in the financial system. The reason we had the crash in 2007-08 was that the pendulum had swung from banks being professional organisations looking after their clients’ interests to being completely sales-driven, profit-seeking organisations. I think the pendulum has swung too far, and it was the swinging of that pendulum that created the mess almost 10 years ago. Unless we deal with that culture, we will not be able to deal properly with the facilitating that big companies and banks can give to criminal finances. It is a shame that that opportunity has not been taken in the Bill.
Not long after I was elected to this place, I was dismayed to learn that the Financial Conduct Authority had withdrawn its promise to look into the banking culture. Why? That was the most obvious thing to do if we were to clean up the financial system. The public were demanding it, and I think that business ethics were demanding it, and I simply cannot understand why neither the FCA nor the Government would carry out a review into the very thing that had facilitated the crash and that could indeed facilitate another crash if we are not careful.
Our new clause 18 deals with protection for whistleblowers. Given what I understand about the culture of banks, I know that it is very difficult for a bank employee to put their head above the parapet. People who work in those organisations and who have information that law enforcement agencies could use to address and pursue criminality should have protection. Quite simply, if anyone in a bank raises their head above the parapet and tells all and sundry that the bank is committing or facilitating criminal finance acts, their career is over, not only in that bank but more generally in the financial services sector. The consequence of honesty and transparency should not be that such people lose their jobs and their livelihoods. There should be some form of protection, which is why we have tabled that new clause.
That concludes my submissions on the new clauses that we have tabled, other than to say again—ad nauseam —that we support the principles of the Bill but we do not believe that it goes far enough in certain areas. We applaud the direction of travel in which it will take the UK economy, and we hope that we will be able to go further. We hope that its provisions will not be caught up in red tape and bureaucracy, and that they will actually work so that we can get at the bad guys’ money and the rest of us who play by the rules can have a fair crack of the whip.