My Lords, the Minister rightly wishes the United Kingdom to be ahead of the curve. In relation to Amendment 8, which is the principal amendment that we are considering, she is absolutely right. If she is saying that the objective is co-operation on beneficial ownership information in order to deal with tax evasion and stamp out corruption, money laundering and terrorist finance, that is greatly to be welcomed and is welcomed, as far as I can see, by those in the overseas territories. I will come back to this in a minute, but the amendment will mean that the overseas territories have, as I understand it, committed themselves to provide real-time, 24-hour information in response to requests from the legal authorities in the United Kingdom. That is a massive step forward in this area of great difficulty and challenges and is to be welcomed.
However, I too am concerned about some of the detail of this new clause. It is unfortunate that a clause of this importance has appeared in the Marshalled List so late in the process. Of course, I recognise that my noble friend on the Front Bench is in some difficulty in that this is a major Bill and here we are at the 11th hour having to look at an absolutely vital amendment, and one has to make some allowance for that. But I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, about exactly what information is going to come from the UK and who on earth will verify that information. The overseas territories have every right to be told exactly what the information is and how it has been verified. In addition, there seems to be a great rush to have this work done in the next period so that it will all be based on one year’s experience. This is a major step forward and I wonder whether 12 months is enough. We have heard this evening from my noble friend that the Turks and Caicos Islands are hoping to get started soon, but one year is really asking an awful lot, and not many statisticians would work on the basis of one year’s information. Nevertheless, we are where we are.
I have one other concern. Proposed new subsection (2) states:
“The report must include an assessment of the effectiveness of those arrangements, having regard to such international standards as appear to the relevant Minister to be relevant”.
We do not know who the Minister may be in the next Government or what international standards are to be used. I do not blame my noble friend for this, but I suggest to her that when the report comes forward, we shall want to have great clarity about what international standards are being used and whether they are being consistently used in the analysis of implementation that flows from the new clause in Amendment 8. However, the basic point is that there must be great joy both in the overseas territories and in the law enforcement
agencies of the United Kingdom that they are now going to get a first-class service which ought to have a major impact on the areas that I have described.
I have had the privilege of working overseas in Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, and I spent part of my national service in Canada. Certainly when I was in commerce, with the Reckitt & Colman Overseas group, one of the bugbears about international trade—I am talking about several decades ago, but I am afraid it has not changed—is that it is not a level playing field. Here we are, approaching Brexit and hoping to trade internationally, but the tragedy of the situation is that somehow neither we in the United Kingdom nor other countries have ever managed to persuade the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore to have a central, non-public register. We have not even got that far. Even on the basis of what we are doing now, we have rivals. Make no mistake about it: most of our overseas territories are in the Caribbean, their main competitor is the United States and they do not even have a central beneficial ownership register. Not only will they lose business if we go too far but if the other parties, particularly the US, Singapore and Hong Kong, take business from our overseas territories, the net result will be that where we are getting information out of our overseas territories, if the business goes elsewhere then the co-operation that the UK gets from those territories—which is good and is going to be even better—will be totally undermined. Frankly, we will not get any information from the US, Hong Kong or Singapore.
On Amendment 14, which keeps reappearing, I certainly do not think that Her Majesty’s Government are committed to producing anything on a public register at the end of the review on beneficial ownership. The review should be solely on that subject, and there may well need to be further amendments or extensions to that situation. I remind noble Lords that neither the law enforcement agencies nor the tax authorities support public registers. UK intelligent law enforcement is a key part of our foreign policy, and we look for co-operation from friendly countries across the world. That will be jeopardised still further if there are these public registers.
So I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that I support very much what she has done on the Bill and the way that she has pushed forward progress with the overseas territories. However, let us be quite clear: beneficial ownership is one thing, and it is very important, but in my view public registers are totally à décours.