Beneficial Ownership Registers: Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies

Debate between Margaret Hodge and Andy Slaughter

Thursday 7th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

Yes. Sadly, London has become the jurisdiction of choice for too much of our dirty money. The all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax has been successful—albeit not as much as I would have liked—in achieving changes to economic crime legislation to challenge and start tackling that.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on leading the debate, and more particularly on the forensic and persistent way she has dealt with this issue over so many years. It is clear that London is the centre of much of the wrongdoing in this area. That is not a coincidence; it is because the Government have been permissive. Has she had an indication of whether they are now prepared to back her proposals?

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

My hon. Friend is right. I have often said that it is not just this Government who have done that; the Labour Government, in their time, also deregulated to such an extent that they allowed London to become the centre of this activity. I do not feel that the Government are doing all that they can to try to turn that around. I await a future Labour Government, and I will watch Labour Ministers with an eagle eye to ensure that they do that.

The debate is not just about the role of the overseas territories and Crown dependencies in facilitating economic crime; their activities as secrecy jurisdictions are a threat to our national security, as the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) said. The Foreign Affairs Committee said as much in a report on the matter, and as recently as November it called on the Government to ensure that the overseas territories fulfil their commitment, adding that

“there should be no further deadline extensions.”

We know, for example, that between 2008 and 2018, £68 billion flowed out of Russia and into our overseas territories. We are a favourite jurisdiction for receiving Russian-laundered money. We know that individuals who are sanctioned use the overseas territories and Crown dependencies to hide their assets just before sanctioning to prevent those assets from being frozen. Abramovich and Usmanov are two classic examples of that practice.

We know the role of the overseas territories in preventing us from knowing the actual beneficial owner of property in the UK. Over 70% of the properties in the list of those that we know about are owned by companies registered either in the Crown dependencies or the BVI. We still cannot identify the beneficial owners of two thirds of those 70%, because they use trusts to hide their identity, and 85%—more than eight out of 10—of those trust arrangements are based in the three Crown dependencies and the BVI.

Most recently, in the Cyprus papers, which have just been uncovered, we found a direct link between Vladimir Putin and Roman Abramovich, with money going from Abramovich to two men dubbed as “wallets” for Putin—a man whose salary is $100,000, but whose wealth is rumoured to be between $125 billion and $200 billion. The theft of money from the Russian people is facilitated by secrecy jurisdictions such as Cyprus, but also by our own tax havens.

The problem is massive, and the role of our overseas territories and Crown dependencies is central. Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton understood that when he went to Davos in January 2013—over 10 years ago—and warned multinationals to

“wake up and smell the coffee”.

I will give a few more quotes from him. In 2013, he pledged:

“Every one of the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories are going to have an action plan on beneficial ownership”.

He told the overseas territories to rip aside the “cloak of secrecy” by creating public registers of beneficial ownership. In 2014, he wrote to the overseas territories, saying that public registers were

“vital to meeting the urgent challenges of illicit finance and tax evasion.”

In September 2015, he accused them of

“frankly…not moving anywhere near fast enough…if we want to break the business model of people stealing money and hiding it in places where it can’t be seen: transparency is the answer.”

When Lord Cameron launched our UK register in 2016, he said that

“it’s better for us all to have an open system which everyone has access to, because the more eyes that look at this information the more accurate it will be.”

At the anti-corruption summit in May 2016, he said:

“We’ve talked about the need for every country to ultimately reach what I call the gold standard of having a public register of beneficial ownership. And I am clear that I include all the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies.”

Lord Cameron is now in a position to act, and I urge the Minister to tell his boss to do so. When even Nigeria, Ukraine, Albania and Morocco have introduced public registers, why can our tax havens not?

Using the European Court of Justice ruling to delay the implementation of public registers is a convenient but lame excuse. It actually has not deterred Gibraltar. While some countries have closed their registers, others have kept them open. Crown dependencies in particular are acting in a completely dishonourable way. Their role in facilitating economic crime and tax avoidance is indisputable, and their protestations to the contrary are simply untrue. Their behaviour in providing public assurances that they will move towards public registers but claiming that the European court ruling prevents them from doing so is, in my view, unforgivable.

Economic Crime: Law Enforcement

Debate between Margaret Hodge and Andy Slaughter

Thursday 7th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I will keep it tight.

It is shocking but true that it was the tragedy of the war in Ukraine that got our Government to start thinking about the serious threat that the country faces, in both our economy and our society, from the spiralling menace of illicit finance and all that goes with it. I have said many times in the House, and I repeat today, that we will never enjoy sustained, good economic prosperity on the back of dirty money. We earned the reputation on which our superb, successful financial sector was built by being a trusted jurisdiction, and we must maintain that. Today, we are in danger of losing that trust.

The US sees us as a high-risk jurisdiction similar to Cyprus, and Londongrad is becoming a popular term among many. We have moved off our perch as the world’s leaders in fighting economic crime. Moody’s has downgraded us, and we are slipping down the ranks of Transparency International’s corruption perception index. Everything is moving in the wrong direction. That is no surprise because, as the hon. Member said, economic crime is now massive. It costs the country £290 billion annually—more than a quarter of the Government’s total public expenditure—and all of us who are concerned with this area know that that figure is conservative. The latest figures from UK Finance that came out last week suggest that in 2020 there was an 8% increase in fraud, which of course is the biggest component of economic crime.

Much illicit finance, but not all, comes from Russia, through Russian companies and Russian individuals. As various Select Committee reports on the subject show, for too long we have turned a blind eye to the threat that Putin’s kleptocratic regime poses to our economy. Why did we do nothing after the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, or after the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in 2018? Those were two brutal attacks on British soil.

We must add to that the findings of a recent report by Buzzfeed News investigations, which established that between 2003 and 2016, there were 14 more suspicious deaths in the UK of individuals who were hostile to the Russian state. I will mention just three of them. Stephen Curtis, the British lawyer who helped the laundering of money—potentially billions of pounds—in the UK for wealthy Russian oligarchs, died in a helicopter crash in 2004. Alexander Perepilichnyy blew the whistle on a multimillion-pound Government fraud in Russia. He flew to Britain, and died of a so-called heart attack when jogging near his home in Surrey in 2012. The coroner’s inquest said that he died of natural causes, but evidence given, I gather, behind closed doors for national security reasons said that there was no natural cause determined. Some suspect that he was poisoned. Boris Berezovsky, who made his wealth during the collapse of the Soviet Union, was famous because he was key in supporting Putin and getting him into power in Russia. In 2013, he was found hanged in his home.

Those are only three of 14 cases, but in all of them the police concluded that the deaths were not suspicious. There was no investigation, or indeed any suggestion that those were Russian state-sanctioned murders, although the US intelligence services told our police that they thought the deaths were likely sanctioned by the Kremlin. Were the police just incompetent? I doubt it. Was there pressure from somewhere else—from either our security services or our Government—to turn a blind eye to the possibility that those were state-sanctioned murders? American intelligence officials told Buzzfeed journalists that Russian killers had been able to kill in Britain with impunity. They said that one of the reasons for the reticence of enforcement agencies to act was

“a desire to preserve the billions of pounds of Russian money that pour into British banks and properties each year.”

As we debate the failures of our enforcement agencies in tackling illicit wealth, we should bear in mind that the problem goes well beyond the funding, the skills and the effectiveness of the enforcement agency. If we are really to eradicate dirty money, we require action on a wide number of fronts, as the all-party parliamentary group for fair business banking and the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax have said. We have put together a good manifesto that could form the start of concerted action to rid us of this terribly bad thing. We talk in the manifesto about action on four fronts. We need smart regulation, much greater transparency, proper accountability and enforcement. We are debating enforcement today.

All those measures are interdependent, and I worry a lot that the Government’s response through the economic crime Bill, which should be with us in the autumn, will be too little and too fragmented. Reform of Companies House, for which we have argued for a long time, is necessary but not sufficient. So are reform of anti-money laundering regulations, and an open register of property owned by foreign countries. We need co-ordinated action on many fronts if we are to clean up dirty Britain.

Today, we are focusing on enforcement. Our performance is abysmal, our record in successfully bringing bad players to account is miserable and our commitment to doing the job properly is questionable. The evidence—the hon. Member already talked about some of it—is overwhelming. The Bribery Act was introduced in 2010, and in the UK we have had 99 criminal convictions and six deferred prosecution agreements. The USA, with a similar legislative framework, has had 236 convictions in the same period. As I understand it—I could not find one, but if I am wrong, I stand to be corrected—we have never pursued a criminal prosecution against a bank for money laundering or sanctions busting. We use civil measures, but never criminal ones. In 2019, we had civil fines of £260 million. In the same year, the Americans pursued criminal action against and secured £2.5 billion from just six banks, and they secured £5 billion in civil fines.

As the hon. Member said—it is worth repeating, because it is so shocking—the Financial Conduct Authority fined HSBC £64 million in 2021 for AML failures, but nearly a decade before, it was fined £1.4 billion in America for AML offences. Standard Chartered is a British bank, so we ought to be the ones who are really responsible for ensuring that it behaves itself. What do we get from it? Fines for wrongdoing under anti-money laundering regulations of £102 million. What do the Americans get? Over 800% more: £842 million. Yet we know from the FinCEN—the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—files that too many of our banks and too many individuals who work in our banks either passively collude with economic crime, or actively promote and facilitate money launderings. The banks that are implicated are so often the biggest British-based banks: HSBC, Barclays, Standard Chartered.

What we do in Britain is pursue the little businesses, the little men and women who are trying hard to establish new businesses here. That came home to me very much when I chaired the Public Accounts Committee and we had the leaks relating to HSBC—they were called the Falciani leaks. There were more documents relating to British accounts than, I think, for any other nation. There were 3,600 British accounts. At the time, the tax authorities said to us that there was cause for concern with about a third of those. Out of that third—about 1,200—they finally found 150 cases. How many did they pursue? One individual was charged. I could not find, in my search of Google, whether that individual was ever convicted. Look at how other countries dealt with it: every other country managed to charge more people, fine more people and get some compensation. The only thing that happened with us was that Rona Fairhead, now in the House of Lords, was on the board of HSBC at the time and was responsible for the audit committee. I cannot understand how anybody with that responsibility could not have seen a red flag when looking through the accounts from the Swiss branch of HSBC and seeing the profits being secured. The only thing she said was that she declared that the whistleblower was a criminal and that the only thing that HSBC should do was pursue the whistleblower and try to get him imprisoned.

Fraud is the crime that now affects one in 11 adults in the UK, yet convictions for fraud have collapsed by two-thirds in the past three years—cases up and convictions down. The number of criminal cases the Serious Fraud Office, in which we had great confidence, has under investigation has halved over the past three years. There have been some disastrous failures in the courts through the SFO with Serco and Unaoil, where it lost cases simply because it did not share information in a proper way—it failed to disclose relevant material to the defendants. There are lawyers in the Chamber. I am not one, but I cannot believe that it actually did that.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent analysis of the situation. At the moment, the SFO is itself being investigated by a former Director of Public Prosecutions and being sued by the people it should be investigating. It lacks the money, the personnel and the powers to do its job. It has a £53 million a year budget against hundreds of billions of dirty money. This is a peashooter against an elephant, is it not? This needs reform urgently.

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I completely agree with those observations, which are so well made.

The National Crime Agency has dropped its prosecutions by 35% in the past five years. The record of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which we do not often talk about, is equally awful. It sees its purpose entirely as simply getting tax revenues in. That is important, but it also has a duty to ensure that anybody who acts unlawfully in the way that they deal with the revenue authorities—or, more seriously, evade tax—is pursued. Yet it simply does not see that as part of its functions. Compare that to the Department for Work and Pensions, where anybody who has an allegation of fraudulently claiming benefit is pursued with vigour by the authorities in that agency. A similar attitude should be taken to what I consider the serious crime of deliberately avoiding tax and not paying into the common pot for the common good.

There are some egregious cases of schemes dreamt up with no purpose other than to avoid tax. One example was Working Wheels, which hit my desk when I was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. In that instance, the person who wanted to avoid tax pretended that they were selling second-hand cars. That created money that then whirled through the system to create a debt, which they were able to claim against the tax liability from their legitimate earnings. Chris Moyles was persuaded that he could become a second-hand car dealer. Telling people that you are a second-hand car dealer is fraudulent. It is a fraud. And why that is not pursued with the same vigour as somebody who tries to lie about their circumstances to get a better benefit settlement is beyond belief. One of our recommendations is that HMRC should have an absolute statutory duty to pursue wrongdoing with the same vigour with which it pursues getting money into our coffers.

All the agencies are grossly underfunded. The Government trumpet the £100 million they will get from the economic crime levy, but that is peanuts when set alongside what the banks themselves spend on anti-money laundering and what other countries spend. Under Biden, the Americans have increased their expenditure on enforcement by more than 30%, because they define it as a security issue. What have we done here? We have had a real cut of 4.5%.

We have lots of ideas that would not require a call on taxpayers’ money. We could enable a percentage of the fines collected from successful actions to be used to fund further activity and staffing within the enforcement agency. We could follow the American example and say that costs incurred by the defendant, were we to lose cases, should in no way be met from the public purse. Why should people against whom we allege wrongdoing in relation to Government funding be allowed such a contribution? One thing we will come back to is the sanctioning of individuals. We have frozen the assets of a lot of Russian oligarchs, but we have no mechanism to seize those assets. A move from freezing to seizing—we are doing some work next week to look at the practical changes that would have to be brought in to enable that to happen—would release more resources not just for enforcement activity but, in this instance, to help with the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war.

Staffing must grow. For example, there are only 118 employees to deal with more than half a million suspicious activity reports a year that the agencies receive. By my arithmetic, that is 4,250 reports per official. In Germany, there are 500 reports per official. In Australia, there are 1,400 reports per official. They are all better staffed than we are here. This is so much an invest-to-save activity. It is a nonsense that the Government do not distribute their resources in a way that enables that to happen.

There is also the chaos of our existing regulatory infrastructure, which is fragmented. As the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton said, lots of stuff falls through the holes. A lot of whistleblowers and people come to me with cases, and I refer a case to one agency, which tells me to refer it to another, and it then disappears and I never hear about it again.

We must take on board the failure of the professionals to self-regulate. There are too many bodies; 13 bodies supervise the accountancy sector. The hon. Member and I met representatives of one of those the other day. I think that they have suspended seven people in the past year. That is a nonsensical figure in relation to the activity that is taking place—the collusion and facilitation of wrongdoing—so we have to sort out the regulation of the enablers and the regulator. There is an overarching regulator, which regulates all the regulators. That should be sorted out and personal responsibility must be taken.

I will make two other points. The most egregious case that I have come across—this is a comment on all our regulatory systems and our failure to enforce—relates to Lebanon, where there was a tragic explosion in a warehouse that had fertiliser, which was supposed to go to Mozambique. That resulted in hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries and massive damage to property. A few weeks after that occurred, I got a phone call from a Reuters journalist with whom I regularly work. He told me that the company that owned the fertiliser was British-registered. I gave my usual comment about “hopeless, lax regulation” and did not think twice about it. About three weeks after that, I got a number of phone calls from people in Lebanon, the Lebanese Bar Association and others. It emerged that the company had been set up here as a UK-based company by a woman in Cyprus who was in fact the company service provider. She put herself down as the beneficial owner, but she obviously was not. She told HMRC that it was a dormant company, but it obviously was not because it was dealing in fertiliser. It then emerged that the real owners were Russian-Syrians and that the fertiliser was going nowhere near Mozambique, but to Assad to be used in barrel bombs to kill his people. That is a shocking story, but it demonstrates how our regulatory infrastructure and the failure of our enforcement agencies damages the lives of people not just here at home but abroad.

I have a final story, which, again, causes me great concern. After the Kazakhstan tragedy—a demonstration against the kleptocrats who run the regime where Russian soldiers were used to fire at the crowds and people were killed—two British academics came to me with their research, which demonstrated that there were 30 individuals in Kazakhstan who were involved in money laundering and human rights abuses and whom we should sanction. I used the privilege of the House to mention the 30 individuals in an Adjournment debate and then sent the list to the Foreign Office. A few days after that, I got a letter from one of the people I had named, asserting his innocence. Obviously, he wanted me to respond outside the House, so I acknowledged the letter and did nothing more. I then got a second letter with a phone call, asking whether we had received the letter. My assistant said that we had. I then got a letter from the desk at the Foreign Office asking me whether we had received the letter, whether we were responding and what we were going to do about it. I asked the Foreign Office why it was pursuing this and on whose behalf it was working. It said that it thought that it was important to facilitate relations between kleptocrats and British politicians.

That is shocking and leads me to think: are the Government really serious about bearing down on all the economic crime and corruption that week after week, year after year, we talk about in the House? If they are, they must pursue consistently and vigorously every instance of it, and not just the Russian kleptocrats—evil though they are—but kleptocrats elsewhere who are stealing from and killing their people and creating instability in the world.

Housing Benefit

Debate between Margaret Hodge and Andy Slaughter

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Hodge]

I agree entirely. There are several quotes in the press from senior civil servants demonstrating that they think the proposal will create the greatest dispersal of families that has been witnessed probably since the 19th century. Perhaps that is part of the political intent of the Government.

In my view, the litany of cuts that I have outlined—all of them, not just the housing benefit cuts—represent an historic assault on the poorest families in the poorest communities, which I think even Baroness Thatcher would have considered to be a bridge too far.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am glad that we have reached that point so early in the debate. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we seem to have moved from a position where the proposals look like ill-thought-out budget cuts to a position where they look like a deliberate policy to socially cleanse the poor from central London, which the Minister is defending? We have already seen that process in Hammersmith, with the demolition of council estates. The proposals will ensure that, for ideological and electoral reasons, it will no longer be possible for the mixed communities of London to continue to exist as they have for centuries.

[Margaret Hodge]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. In my view, the process is much more about political engineering than it is about achieving sensible reductions in public expenditure. I shall talk about the impact that the proposals will have in my constituency and the borough of Barking and Dagenham. In doing so, I hope to expose the flaws in the Government’s argument and what I think is the shameful agenda that they are, in fact, pursuing.

The Minister claims that the policy objective of the cap on local housing allowance—setting that cap at 33% of average local rents—linking housing benefit to the lower consumer price index rather than the retail price index and capping the total benefits that workless households receive, is to drive down rents. Let me tell him that he will not achieve his objective. His policies will not drive down rents. What they will do is drive out families—drive them in their droves out of the inner-London constituencies where they live to constituencies such as my own in the London suburbs.

Let us consider the facts—these are the facts from the Department for Work and Pensions, not my facts. In Brent, 9,650 families will lose from £18 a week to £160 a week and the families who will lose the most are those with the most children. In Hackney, 16,440 families will lose from £13 a week to £125 a week, and again the families who will lose the most are those with the most children. We can also take the example of Camden, where 2,940 families will lose from £20 a week to £262 a week, and yet again the families losing most are those with the most children.

It is simply nonsense to believe that the rents in Brent, Hackney or Camden will go down. A survey by London Councils found that 60% of landlords who are renting to tenants in receipt of housing benefit would not be prepared to reduce their rent by even a small amount if their tenants could no longer afford to pay the existing rate because of the reduction in local housing allowances. More than 90% of landlords said that they would try to evict a tenant or refuse to renew their contract if the tenant fell into arrears, if the shortfall in rent was more than £20 a week. Those landlords know that their properties will not lie empty. We all know that there is a massive shortage of housing in the capital and we know that, with the drying up of the mortgage market, more people are being forced into the private rented sector, which in turn increases demand in that sector. We know that the buy-to-let market is booming, because investors can get a good return on their properties. Landlords will not lower their rents, but poor people will be forced out of their houses.

Do not just listen to me on this subject—listen to Boris Johnson, the Conservative Mayor of London, when he says in the briefing that he prepared for today’s debate that the Government’s proposals will lead to

“the loss of the private rented sector as a major safety net for London boroughs”.

He continues:

“We expect landlords to leave the housing benefit market due to the perceived instability of housing benefit in the short and medium term”.

Those are Boris Johnson’s words, not mine.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margaret Hodge]

I accept the point that insufficient priority was given to the building of council houses under the Labour Government, but we must deal with the situation in which we find ourselves. Making the position worse by deliberately forcing the poorest families out of the only homes that they can find is an outrageous and cruel act of public policy.

Does the Minister accept or even understand that if the reforms proceed, inner London will become a no-go area for the poorest people in our communities? What will be the further impact on my constituency? He knows well that changes in housing tenure over the past 20 years, since the introduction of the right to buy, have created deep social tensions in Barking and Dagenham as new people have moved into the borough and established residents have become unable to secure homes for their sons and daughters. The extreme right and the British National party tried to exploit people’s legitimate frustrations for divisive and evil political ends. We saw them off, but this Government’s housing benefit policies will inevitably reignite those tensions as private tenants from inner-London boroughs compete for homes with established residents of Barking and Dagenham. Has he considered at all the implications for social cohesion of his short-sighted reform proposals?

Has the Minister also considered his policies’ impact on local authority services? If Barking and Dagenham suddenly experiences an influx of literally thousands of families, what will that do to local schools and hospitals, to special educational needs provision and to child protection services in the borough? The proposals will place an unacceptable strain on local authorities in the more deprived outer boroughs—authorities that are already struggling to meet their communities’ needs in areas such as housing and education while planning to meet the 25% to 40% cuts that will be forced on them by the comprehensive spending review announcements next week.

In education, for example, Barking and Dagenham is already facing the huge challenge of keeping up with the pace of demographic change. Demand for primary school places is a particular problem not only for my constituency but across London. As it is, the local authority is having to create hundreds of new reception places every year—337 extra primary school places are needed in 2011 and 247 in 2012—and does not have sufficient funding to meet projected demand. The borough simply cannot cope with further significant levels of inward migration.

Barking and Dagenham council already has a housing waiting list of more than 11,000. That waiting list will only grow longer as more people move into the area and more households seek to be housed by the local authority because they have been priced out of the private sector.

[Mr Slaughter]

As my right hon. Friend may know, that is already happening. Kensington council is urging people to move out before the rush starts. Hammersmith council is urging overcrowded families to give up their secure and assured tenancies and to move into the private sector and rely on housing benefit, without telling them that they will then have to leave the borough next year when that benefit is cut.

[Margaret Hodge]

That is outrageous. I must also tell the Minister that I am absolutely convinced that within a year or two, boroughs and authorities such as Kensington and Chelsea or Hammersmith, from which families move out to areas such as Barking and Dagenham or Tower Hamlets, will cease to take responsibility for providing all the other local authority services that those families will need. They will then be an additional burden on those local authorities.

Who will foot the bill for social services and support for those families? They are already on the edge, and they are bound to make greater demands as they are uprooted from their inner-London homes and lose their links with the local services on which they depend. Has the Minister properly considered the impact of the proposals to cut housing benefit on the demand for other local authority services? Has he received advice on whether the proposals will increase homelessness and child poverty, as I believe they inevitably will?

The reforms will not achieve what the Government claim, but that is only half the story. The truth is that the Government want to drive low-income families out of inner London and other wealthy areas. London Councils estimates that at least 82,000 London households will find themselves in that position, and that is without taking into account the impact of the measures announced at the party conference last week. People will not have the option to move to a cheaper property in the same area because there will be none, unless they are prepared to downsize and move into overcrowded accommodation. They will have no choice but to move to areas where rents are more affordable. That will be a tragedy for families and communities. It is completely wrong of the Government to implement such a policy, with the full knowledge of the demographic upheaval that it will cause, and to leave local authorities to cope with the consequences.

We will also lose the diverse communities and social mix that have been a part of London’s character for generations. Central London will become the home of young professionals and the very well-off who, conveniently, can be relied on to vote Conservative. Those struggling on low incomes will congregate in the outer boroughs, which will become more disadvantaged, overstretched and troubled. The reforms will cause suffering and push more families into poverty by forcing them to contribute more of their income to housing costs. Members of all parties recognise the need to reform housing benefit, but this is not the way to go about it.

The reforms have not been properly thought through. They have the potential to cause hardship of a kind not seen since the creation of the welfare state, and they have been informed by a disgraceful political calculation. How a Liberal Democrat can attempt to defend them is beyond me. What evidence do the Government have to support their claim that the new cap will reduce rents in the private sector? What additional resources will be made available to help local authorities such as Barking and Dagenham cope with any significant increase in inward migration? Finally, how will the Government keep their promise to eradicate child poverty, given the hardship that their policy will inflict on low-income families?