It is a real pleasure to speak after the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). We have worked together on so much, and we have worked on this legislation for a long time.
I will talk about new clause 2 when I come to my comments on whistleblowers, but the main thing I want to talk about is amendment 64. Many hon. Members have spoken about the danger of asset flight. In reality, we know it is happening already; people are not going to wait for this legislation to come into effect to try to hide their money. Whether the transition period is 18 months, six months or 28 days does not really matter, because the individuals in question can move their money around so quickly that much of it will have happened already.
I have supported amendment 16 in the name of the official Opposition, but I would like to think that my manuscript amendment 64, which I am very grateful to Mr Speaker and the Deputy Speakers for selecting, might be more effective. There are some other important amendments that have been tabled, such as new clauses 28 and 29, on freezing orders, but the difficulty with those new clause, as I said in my earlier intervention, is that we cannot freeze something that we do not know exists. That is very difficult to do. We need to look behind the curtain at who owns the assets. That is obviously what this Bill does; it is primarily about transparency and being able to see who owns what.
I am grateful for the support of many people on manuscript amendment 64, including my hon. Friend—he should be right honourable—the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), the Government’s anti-corruption champion. We have worked closely on this, and as soon as we looked at the Bill we thought, “There’s something missing here. Clearly, these people are going to move this money around very quickly to make sure it’s not touched.”
I think this amendment probably does something, although I am not a lawyer—I looked at this over the weekend and I did not have any legal input, so I cannot say it is totally fit for purpose and I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say about it. He has engaged on this issue all the way through and been
willing to discuss with me, as we did yesterday, what we can do to close this potential loophole. The amendment would simply require beneficial ownership to be registered with Companies House, which links into the Land Registry’s requirement to ensure that something is properly registered with Companies House before it allows a transfer or a sale to happen. Without the Land Registry doing that, of course, people cannot sell or transfer a piece of land or property.