Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Peter Grant and Alison Thewliss

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and note on the record that Labour did not vote on any of the reasons that I sought to amend in the Reasons Committee. I have yet to hear any explanation for why Labour Members would not use any mechanism available to them to oppose the Bill.

We had yet another press conference this afternoon. The Prime Minister did not come to this House to talk about his gurning and his greeting that those mean old Lords would not let him have his way. I point out that the Conservatives have over 100 more Lords than Labour. Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm from their own Lords is reflective of the fact that many of them did not even show up to vote last week. The policy was not in the Conservative party manifesto. The Government have no mandate for the Rwanda plan whatsoever. Indeed, what manifesto would they put in front of people that would say, “We’re going to set out to breach our international commitments and engage in state-sponsored people trafficking?” What manifesto would that be?

Let me mention briefly some of the things that the Prime Minister mentioned in his statement. He suddenly conjured up a whole load of judges to determine these cases, when they could perhaps better serve by looking at the appeals backlog that his incompetent bulk processing of asylum claims has created. He mentioned charter flights being booked, but many commercial companies, including the Rwandan state carrier, have refused to be involved in the charter flights at all, so which companies have been engaged to do that and at what cost? We still do not know.

The Prime Minister said:

“The first flight will leave in 10 to 12 weeks.”

Will that be before or after we reach summer recess—we already know how far the timescale on this has slipped for the Government—and what scrutiny will occur should they take off during recess? If the Government do manage to send anybody to Rwanda, where will they put them? We know that the Rwandans have sold off the housing that they set up to place people in. Will they be piling them up in tents? I would not put it past this Government, but that would be useful to know.

We fully support the Lords amendments, which do their very best to mitigate an absolutely dreadful piece of legislation. I cannot see what the Government’s objection is to Lords amendment 3G. They are all about taking back control, but they want absolutely no parliamentary scrutiny of whether Rwanda remains a safe country. The right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) rightly pointed out that we in this place have no means of declaring Rwanda unsafe, so it is safe in perpetuity—forever and ever. We cannot declare it unsafe should something happen, and that is just not logical. I note also that the Irish High Court ruled last month that, in the light of these plans, the UK is not a safe country to send asylum seekers to.

I fully support Lords amendment 10F relating to Afghans. I have mentioned many times before my support for the Afghans who served and supported UK objectives in Afghanistan and how woeful the Government’s response to their needs has been.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the £11,000 it costs per person to deport to Rwanda could be used right now to rescue my constituent and his wife, who got out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan and are now stuck there waiting for the UK Government to rescue them?

[Alison Thewliss]

I wholeheartedly agree. I know of many cases of people who have been sorely let down by the Government.

We note that the figures that the Government brought out this morning show that there has been an increase in small boat arrivals in the past three months compared with last year. The plan is hardly any kind of deterrent if people are still coming over in small boats in their droves. Among them were 1,216 Afghans—an increase on the 1,098 who came in the same period last year. If the Minister thinks that the Afghan schemes are such a roaring success, why are so many Afghans being forced on to small boats just to get to safety? Many of them will have family in this country, many will have been unable to avail themselves of the Afghan schemes that he so talks up, and many will not have been able to use family reunion, which is an existing safe and legal route.

Given the time, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will not go into detail on the Afghan cases that I wished to mention. However, I will say this to the Government: this legislation is utterly despicable. It is state-sponsored people trafficking, it is against our obligations in international law, and Scotland wants no part of it. We will oppose it every step of the way.

Ceasefire in Gaza

Debate between Peter Grant and Alison Thewliss

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I thank the speakers who have come and raised their voices on behalf of the people of Gaza today.

We are here today in condemnation of the atrocities committed against innocent people in Israel by Hamas on 7 October. We are here today in condemnation of the atrocities committed by Israel against innocent people in Gaza every day since then. We are here today in condemnation of the taking of hostages, indiscriminate violence, maiming, use of snipers, rape and sexual assault, starvation, and attacks in places of worship, schools and hospitals. It must stop now. A pause is not enough. Filling the bellies of starving weans one day just to bomb them the next is not acceptable.

Pregnant women—those who have not miscarried or suffered stillbirth due to the unimaginable strain of living in a war zone—cannot time their labour for whenever that pause might fall. ActionAid has reported that Al-Awda, the only functioning maternity hospital in northern Gaza, was hit three times in the past week. It is intolerable.

Members on both sides of the House have outlined the horrors in Gaza. We have heard of wee Hind Rajab, aged only six; of the poet Refaat Alareer; and of Dima Alhaj, who lived in Glasgow and was killed alongside her six-month-old baby, her husband and two brothers. Dima was a health worker for the World Health Organisation. Dr Abdullatif, a colleague of my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), lost 50 members of his family, including children and grandchildren, when their home was bombed. The journalist Wael al-Dahdouh lost his wife, his daughter, two sons and other family members.

I highlight those stories because when we get beyond the more than 100 journalists, the 150 United Nations workers, the estimated 400 health workers—the 30,000 of our fellow human beings who have been killed—their stories become a cacophony of tragedy. It cannot be anything other than collective punishment. As the International Court of Justice has found, there is a plausible risk that genocide is being perpetrated by Israel. More deaths will follow without a ceasefire and without the full flow of humanitarian aid, which Israel has been holding up, being allowed in. The Palestinian Red Crescent has seen its lifesaving work disrupted by Israeli forces. There is a real fear for the people now sheltering in Rafah—1.4 million of them—if a further attack lands on them.

There are many ways to die in Gaza, from disease or starvation as well as from bombardment. And what of those who survive—the 1.9 million displaced, homeless and destitute, left among the rubble of their lives; those who are orphaned; and the 70,000 injured and suffering enduring trauma? We must not forget those people either.

I have listened carefully to activists from the Gaza Families Reunited campaign who want to allow those with families in the UK to be reunited with them, and to bring families to sanctuary here. The UK has granted very few visas to Palestinians over the years—only 1,300 since 2014. My hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) has talked previously about Dr Lubna Hadoura. In Glasgow, there is my constituent Sama. There is Reem, to whom I listened on a call yesterday. There are Grace Franklin and Alison Phipps, who have Palestinian friends. None of them have found a safe and legal route, because none exists. People are fundraising to bribe their way out of Gaza for lack of a safe and legal route, all the time worrying and waiting for news of whether their relatives are dead or alive. There has been a scheme for Ukraine. Why is there, as yet, no scheme for Gaza?

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Some of the questions that have been asked of us today have been about how we can know what will happen if there is a ceasefire. Does my hon. Friend agree that the real problem is that we know exactly what will happen if there is no ceasefire, and that that alone should be enough to ensure that we vote for one tonight?

[Alison Thewliss]

That point is crucial. We know what the consequences will be if there is no ceasefire and we continue as we are now: thousands more people will die. We do not need to question that, because we know that it will happen, and it will be on our conscience if we choose not to act.

I have never received more emails about an issue, and I know that I have that in common with many other Members in all parts of the House. So far, more than 3,000 people have contacted me about this issue. The ongoing demonstrations outside the House and in towns, villages and cities across these isles show the strength of feeling about the conflict in Gaza, which brings together people from all backgrounds—people who have never protested before, but who see an injustice happening and want us, as parliamentarians, to do something about it.

We all know that peace can be possible, but that it starts with tentative steps. Ceasefires are not easy. The hon. Members for Foyle (Colum Eastwood) and for Belfast South (Claire Hanna) described their experiences, and others brought dispatches from their conversations and visits to the region. We are under no illusions about the challenges, but we must try. In this place we have a duty. We have an obligation, a very special obligation, when it comes to the middle east. During every moment for which we delay and equivocate, more people die. It could not be more crucial than that. This is not a debate about semantics or procedures; it is about principle. It is about the people of Gaza. It is about saving lives.

The hostages must be released. Aid must be allowed in. Negotiations must begin. It is on all our consciences here in this place if we do not stand with our international partners, with countries around the world, with international aid organisations and with the United Nations. We must have a ceasefire, and we must have it now.

Support for Civilians Fleeing Gaza

Debate between Peter Grant and Alison Thewliss

Tuesday 6th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Member is right to talk of doing the humanitarian and right thing. I would suggest that the situation in Gaza has become so critically desperate that the humanitarian response is the only one that can be morally tenable for any of us.

I said that the letter from the Foreign Office was dismissive, and I am sorry to have to say that it was also less than 100% honest. In a letter that was one and a half pages long, the writer talked eight times about what the Foreign Office could and could not do. Let me say again to the Minister that I am not asking the UK Government to do anything that they cannot do. I am not asking them to do anything except what I know other countries, including some of our closest international allies, have already done for the families of their citizens to get them out of Gaza. For the Foreign Office, it is not a question of “We cannot do anything more”, but a question of “We choose not to do anything more”, and I think that that is an untenable position for anyone to adopt at this time.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making some excellent points, and I share his frustrations, having also written to the Foreign Secretary on this issue on behalf of my constituent, Sama, whose family have been evacuated six times. A recent Israel Defence Forces bombardment destroyed the family home, which took them 30 years to build. Does my hon. Friend agree that there needs to be some route for families in that situation? At the moment, Sama has no answers from this Government and there is no way of getting her family to safety.

[Peter Grant]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s comments. One thing that is causing immeasurable upset to my constituent, Dr Hadoura, and to many other Palestinians in the United Kingdom is that they are in contact with Palestinian families in other countries and seeing them getting their loved ones out of Palestine. They know that the UK Government say that they cannot do anything about it, but they see other countries’ Governments being able to do something. Those Governments might have reasons for not wanting to publicise it or for it to be too widely known, but they are willing to go beyond the legal minimum to get people out and reunited with their families.

The last letter I got from the Foreign Office Minister finished by saying:

“ I recognise this will be disappointing news”—

disappointing? Disappointing?—

“but wanted to relay it as soon as possible, so that your constituent can take informed decisions about his family’s next steps.”

Incidentally, it was clear in my letter that Dr Hadoura was a she, not a he. That made me convinced that this was a cut-and-paste job from another letter and that they had not even bothered to tailor it to the individual constituent. And relaying it to me “as soon as possible” meant sending me a letter two months after I had contacted the Minister. By contrast, on Friday last week, within the space of about two hours, my office had two emails and two phone calls from the Foreign Office wanting to know what today’s debate was about. What does that tell us about its priorities? That it was more urgent to sort out which Minister would respond to the debate than to agree to meet Members of Parliament to try and find a way of stopping people dying unnecessarily.

But it was the bit after that in the letter that I found callous beyond belief: it had been sent so that my constituent, Dr Hadoura, could take “informed decisions” about her “family’s next steps”. Precisely what decisions are available to Dr Hadoura, to her family and to the 1.8 million others? What on earth are they supposed to decide about? There are no options. There is no survival plan for those families in Gaza because it is becoming impossible for anyone to survive there. An earlier Government response suggested that they should all apply for visas to travel to the United Kingdom. What a really great idea! It is impossible for them to apply for a visa in Gaza. Where are they going to apply to? Who still has a consulate operating in Gaza? If they try to travel somewhere else in Gaza to get a visa, there is a very high risk that they will be shot. If by some miracle they manage to reach the Egyptian border—remember, the only borders they have are with Israel and Egypt—the border guards will say, “Have you got a visa to travel somewhere else? No? Get back to Gaza, then.” And the whole thing goes round in a circle. They cannot get a visa without getting out of Gaza, and they cannot get out of Gaza without a visa. The Government fully understand that, and they are not prepared to issue visas from here, which, as has been mentioned, they have done for people fleeing from other parts of the world.

Dr Hadoura’s family’s only chance—and the only chance for any of those 1.8 million people—is to be taken out of Gaza under the protection of another Government, as some have been. They need a Government who will negotiate safe passage for them out of Gaza. They need a Government who will give them refuge until it is safe for them to go back home, where they want to live out their lives. They need a Government who will care, not only with their words but with their actions. They need a Government who can look at this human catastrophe with the eyes and hearts of human beings. Within the next 15 minutes or so, we will know whether that description can be applied to this Government.

Public Order Act 2023

Debate between Peter Grant and Alison Thewliss

Tuesday 16th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

The hon. Lady makes the most important point: although the Bill’s territorial extent is England and Wales, anybody who comes to this city to protest—it could be any of our constituents, or any of us—falls under the remit of the Act. It does not discriminate by where someone is from. An Australian could end up getting arrested by accident. Any person who happens to be in the city and in the wrong place at the wrong time, or in the right place at the right time—exercising their right to protest—could end up in a jail cell because of the Act.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Is not the most important point that a lot of the things that our constituents in Scotland want to protest about are bad decisions taken in this place by the Government here? Quite rightly, they want to come to this Parliament to protest against the actions of this Parliament. To do so now, they have to put themselves at risk of being arrested simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree. That is the dangerous nature of the Act.

Freedom of assembly in the UK now exists on the Government’s terms—when the Conservative party deigns to give that right. That right is now so conditional as to be meaningless. In my life, I have—like many of my colleagues—joined many protests, including the Make Poverty History march through the streets of Edinburgh, and protests and marches against the Iraq war. As a member of Scottish CND, I have protested outside Faslane. For migrant rights, I have protested on Brand Street and Kenmure Street. I protested against Labour’s school and nursery closures some years ago in Glasgow, for self-determination in Kashmir, and in support of Pride.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Peter Grant and Alison Thewliss

2nd reading
Thursday 13th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I am glad to follow the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), whom I believe was the Minister who said he was not happy with the progress that had been made on tackling economic crime thus far. None of us in this place are happy about the situation on economic crime.

SNP Members of course welcome this Bill, which is overdue. Many of its aspects could have been picked up in legislation years ago. Members of the anti-corruption coalition across the House have been clear in calling for more action from the UK Government on this, and all this delay has cost us very dearly; openDemocracy believes that economic crime across these islands costs us £290 billion a year—just think of the services we could all be enjoying if that money were not being plundered by those people engaging in economic crime. As with all things around dirty money, we have to ask: who benefits from this? Who benefits from action not having been taken for all these years? There is much to be done, and the panoply of agencies involved must be properly co-ordinated and resourced to tackle it.

This is a big Bill and there is a lot more that could be said. My not saying something in particular now does not discount my saying something about it later, when the Bill goes into Committee. I thank everybody who has sent briefings ahead of this Bill, because that has been incredibly useful.

The UK Government must go after not only those committing economic crimes, but those enabling it. Robust supervision and proper deterrents need to be in place for those responsible for economic crime. Directors and enablers of economic crime need to face proportionate sanctions, and effective anti-money laundering supervision needs to be carried out consistently across sectors. Legislation on economic crime needs to be futureproofed, as a failure to ensure that means that legislators are always playing catch-up with criminals. We see that particularly in the field of crypto.

As Companies House reform is a significant part of this Bill, I will start with a few red flags from the UK Government that I would like to deal with straight up. Having lots of companies on the Companies House register is not the win that Ministers often seem to think it is, mainly because a good chunk of the register is absolute guff. It is like a kid in the playground with an impressive looking pile of football stickers for swapsies; but instead of getting an easy trade for the Kevin van Veen of your dreams, you find that the kid has a pile of doublers, triplers, old stickers from previous seasons, stickers from rugby and cricket, a few with Stormtroopers on and some they have drawn themselves. Sorting out that pile of stickers is pretty easy, but sorting out the millions of companies on the Companies House register is a much tougher task. Even the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy impact assessment, which I would draw everybody’s attention to, hints at the difficulty in unpicking the duplicates from the system. It is riddled with error, never mind the impact of those using it for nefarious purposes.

Having looked myself up on the register, it appears that I am on it three times; three different Alison Thewlisses exist out there in the world—just imagine that! The register believes I am three separate people, rather than the same person having been a director at different points in my life. The Home Secretary, who, disappointingly, has disappeared out of this place before hearing from the third party in this House, is on the register in her own name and in her maiden name, with no link to suggests that we are talking about the same person. The BEIS Secretary is on it as the director of 11 companies with his surname hyphenated and a further three companies with it unhyphenated. I am unclear what the process is by which Companies House will set about tidying up this basic type of messiness within its register. It should not just be put on individuals to fix this; there needs to be some mechanism by which it is all corrected.

The new objectives being given to Companies House are welcome—they are a step up from its being a passive recipient of duff information—but it is unclear how exactly they will work. The querying power must be a wider, separate piece of work to pick through in detail the existing register and figure out what is actually valid, rather than relying on helpful citizens such as Oliver Bullough, Graham Barrow, Richard Smith and David Leask to report in their concerns, as they often do.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

There is, of course, only one Alison Thewliss. She mentioned Graham Barrow as one of a number of exceptional individuals who do a lot to expose the kind of things going on at Companies House that it should really be doing. I do not know whether she has followed his Twitter account recently. On 10 October, he tweeted that Companies House had just accepted the registration of a business called “Legat Business Limited”, which has a single director, called “Andrei Perezhogin”. His nationality is “Russian”, his place of residence is “Russia”, and he describes his occupation as “Men”. He claims to have set up this company with £100 million of capital. Does she share my alarm that it appears that a Russian living in Russia can invest £100 million in a British company and—this is without the powers in this Bill—nobody at Companies House thinks anything of it?

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree and share my hon. Friend’s concerns. Graham Barrow does great work on Twitter and in other places to highlight such scenarios. Whether or not that person exists, whether or not that company is valid, and whether that money is even being invested anywhere, never mind in this company—this exposes the nature of the garbage in the Companies House register. The Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Watford (Dean Russell) should consider what he intends to do about that situation, because the register also contains abusive names and people being registered when they do not know they have been registered. How do such people go about correcting the register where companies have been registered in this way without their knowledge or consent? Home addresses are being used although the person who lives there has no knowledge that their address has been used until a whole wheen of paperwork from Companies House arrives at their door. These things are being regularly exposed; they should not come as news or as any surprise to Companies House or to Ministers in this place. In the interim between this Bill making progress through the House and its eventually coming into force, what will happen to stop these “companies”? They are among the thousands of companies registered every week at Companies House.

The power to query company names where people might be setting them up to impersonate another company or for criminal purposes stands in contrast with the continued objective to allow companies to turn around their registration in 24 hours. There is a substantial industry in creating fake but similar names, and then using those companies to rip off the public. Without a vast increase in staffing in Companies House to assess and sense-check all these applications coming in, it seems that many will continue to slip through the net, even after these reforms. I suggest to the Minister that perhaps it would be better to build in a slightly longer application period to allow proper verification to take place. It is unclear—I seek confirmation from the Minister—whether the verification that is being referred to will be though the existing UK Government verify scheme used for passports, driving licences and tax returns, or whether a separate verification scheme will used. Using the existing schemes seems to work reasonably well for passports, driving licences and tax returns, and I am not aware of any particular issues being flagged for those—if there are, I shall stand corrected.

The BEIS impact assessment dismisses the opportunity to verify the link between directors or persons of significant control and their companies. Again, this should be changed. Furthermore, we have a golden opportunity here to clamp down on opaque ownership structures and I cannot understand why the Government would not want to do so. The Bill must bring in provisions that prevent all companies from being controlled by opaque offshore entities, which do not need to disclose information on their owners or structures because of where they are based.

I still seek to understand from the Ministers why Companies House cannot be an anti-money laundering supervisor in its own right; this is a huge gap within the system. The Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision has had mixed results in holding the AML supervisors under its wing to account; professional bodies have not done all they can to interrogate their members. That would perhaps fall into the area of a failure to prevent offence. Culpable directors, senior managers and other enablers of economic crime, including professional enablers, need to face sanctions, and rules on AML supervision need to be applied consistently. That is not currently happening.

The non-governmental organisation Spotlight on Corruption noted that there are 22 industry bodies that currently oversee AML compliance in the legal and accountancy sectors. In 2021, OPBAS found that just 15% of supervisors were effective in using predicable and proportionate supervisory action; 85% were not. It also found that just 19% had implemented an effective risk-based approach to supervision. This disjointed approach to tackling money laundering is just not working: it is allowing too many to sail through the net.

In the UK, an estimated £88 billion of dirty money is cleaned by criminals every year, compared with the lesser, but still significant, amounts of €54.5 billion in France and €51.53 billion in Germany. To tackle the issue, it is vital that support is offered to smaller firms, which are often targeted by those who wish to engage in money laundering, criminality and other illicit activities, to enable such companies to spot red flags in respect of potential clients.

It is beyond me why the UK Government allow the verification process for company registration to be carried out by company formation agents when they are the very bodies that have to a large extent created the problem that the Government are trying to solve. As the Home Office report “National risk assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing 2020” pointed out:

“Company formation and related professional services are…a key enabler or gatekeeper of TBML”—

trade-based money laundering. We should be reducing their power, not endorsing it.

Under the Bill, all third-party agents who set up a company on behalf of someone else will be required only to declare that the information they are providing on behalf of that person has been verified. I return to my verification question: what is the system for that? Without giving Companies House the ability to carry out independent checks to ascertain whether the “verified” third-party information is correct, it is just going to become a box-ticking exercise. The verification requirement in itself has no teeth and is unlikely to lead to any material change in how third-party agents carry out that key verification process.

Before I leave Companies House, I should say that I am deeply disappointed that the UK Government seem to show no willingness to increase the ridiculously low company registration fee: £10 or £12 is nothing in the scheme of things. In Germany the equivalent fee is €400, and in the Netherlands it is around €52; I am sure the Minister would regard neither country as anti-business. Having a low fee is not the benefit that Ministers seem to think it is. I am open-minded as to what the figure ought to be, but in its economic crime report the Treasury Committee agreed that £100 would be perfectly reasonable and give Companies House more resources to deal with the huge challenges it faces.

Improving relations between Companies House and the various law enforcement agencies is welcome. The Treasury Committee report on economic crime called the landscape “bewildering” and noted that both co-ordination and economic crime itself should be higher priorities for the Government. The scale of the issue is outlined in the BEIS impact assessment, with law enforcement referrals to Companies House rising from 1,400 per annum in 2015 to 9,300 in 2021. Given that we have heard how little economic crime is actually prosecuted, this feels like the tip of a very large iceberg.

With talk of future austerity and cuts, it is important that the UK Government invest in the enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute economic crime. It is a specialist area and it requires well-paid specialist staff to tackle this scourge. The Scottish crime campus at Gartcosh is a great example of both efficiency and inter-agency working, but it can do this only if properly funded. A further round of Westminster austerity puts it all at risk.

I feel like I have been raising Scottish limited partnerships forever, and I have no hesitation about doing so again. Because SLPs hold legal personality and can possess property, they have become a very popular mechanism. The BEIS analysis was quite stark: between 2010 and 2016 they had a growth rate—one that the Government would love—of 459%. That alone should have set off alarm bells from Companies House to the Government Front Bench, but nothing terribly much happened for a long time. BEIS figures also state that as of 31 March 2021, SLPs made up 64% of all limited partnerships on the Companies House register. If we compare that with the fact that companies registered in Scotland make up just 5% of companies in the UK, we can see that something is badly out of whack.

SLP registrations have plateaued since the rules were tightened, but they have not gone away. They have also continued to be implicated in money laundering, arms running and sanctions busting, including in respect of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. They are set up with partners in secrecy jurisdictions, with companies named as persons of significant control, which is against the rules. Linking to an actual person with an actual address would be progress, as would limiting the number of times that an address or person could be a company director. To date, enforcement and fines for breaching the rules that the Government themselves set up have been few and far between. There is little point in having rules that are just not enforced.

As I have pointed out before in this place, there are also knock-on effects to our neighbours in Ireland. As there has been a slight tightening of the rules here, registrations of Irish limited partnerships have soared. What conversations has the Minister had with his counterparts in the Republic to ensure that we are not just shifting criminal activity from here to there? All possible co-operation must be undertaken to avoid criminals shifting their business over the sea.

I wish to ask about the links with other legislation that is currently going through this place. The Financial Services and Markets Bill has a significant section on the regulation of cryptocurrencies, which have become incredibly popular with organised crime incredibly quickly, as a means of shifting money as well as of scamming naive members of the public. It is unclear how the legislation before us interacts with that Bill and the halo effect that might be created by the regulation of certain cryptoassets but not others.

When the Treasury Committee took evidence on the Online Safety Bill—which has disappeared but will hopefully come back at some stage—we were concerned about crimes being carried out via the internet and social media platforms. Currently, the banks of those who are scammed have to pay up, but the social media companies themselves are not held accountable. For example, scams conducted over Instagram or Facebook Marketplace, scam messages sent over WhatsApp and unregulated financial advice given via platforms like TikTok are not currently covered. They should be given an awful lot more attention.

I was glad to hear from the Home Secretary that there have been some conversations with the Scottish Government about the implications of this legislation in Scotland, because Scots law is, of course, a devolved area. Registers of Scotland administers the register of persons holding a controlled interest in land, which was launched on 1 April and shows who controls the decisions of owners or tenants of land and property in Scotland. I would like a bit more information from the Government about the conversations they have had with Registers of Scotland and the interaction with the register of oversees entities. Scotland did not hang around waiting for the UK Government to make legislation on this issue; we got on with the job.

I look forward to tabling amendments to try to improve this Bill, and I really hope that for once the Government will listen and be constructive on some of the issues we raise. We would not be in the situation we are in today had they done so during the debates on the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill or umpty other bits of legislation over the years. We are all clear in this place that robust supervision and proper deterrents need to be in place for those responsible for economic crime.

We on the SNP Benches are looking forward to independence and setting up our own robust systems to register companies and to prevent economic crime. Nobody would choose the UK system as it stands, and it remains to be seen whether it can be adequately repaired.

Tackling Fraud and Preventing Government Waste

Debate between Peter Grant and Alison Thewliss

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

I agree that there needs to be probity when it comes to that kind of money and that kind of behaviour—particularly the overruling of civil servants, if that has indeed been the case.

When I raised some of these matters in the House last week, Ministers pointed to unexplained wealth orders as a great badge of success, so I tabled a parliamentary question to find out how successful they had been. In 2018, the year in which they were introduced, there were three. In 2019, there were six. I thought, “That is great—the numbers are going up”, but there have been none since then. Is this a measure that is actually effective in tackling unexplained wealth? I am not sure that it is.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend will recall that the first ever unexplained wealth order was awarded against someone who was only allowed to become a United Kingdom citizen because of the billions of pounds that she had promised to bring into the United Kingdom. Does my hon. Friend believe that that is an indication that Government policy is fighting against itself? On the one hand the Government want to get people with lots of money into the UK, and on the other hand they do not ask too many questions about where that money has come from.

[Alison Thewliss]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct to draw attention to that. It is one of many deficiencies in the Home Office systems as well. It seems that those with money are given a free pass, whereas those who come here with more humble undertakings to begin their lives here, to work and to build a family, end up being penalised and having to pay an awful lot more in fees, and experiencing all the challenges that that brings.

Hon. Members may think that some of these issues with Companies House seem a bit remote from the real world and the real lives of our constituents, but that could not be further from the truth. During lockdown, a company in Glasgow using myriad company structures made claims under the furlough scheme, but employees of that company never received the money that they were entitled to. Even if the company directors ended up being prosecuted, or HMRC ended up getting its money back, those employees would still get nothing. That shows the complete unfairness in the system. I would be interested to know whether the Government have any figures, from when they have chased down these companies, on how many employees never saw the money that they should have got and that they needed to get by.

For those completely excluded from the covid support schemes, this is all the more galling. Limited company directors and pay-as-you-earn taxpayers were left out because they were deemed too much of a fraud risk, and new mothers who had taken time off to have a child in the preceding three years lost out because calculating their maternity leave was thought to be too complex. Yet as they were being told that by Ministers, the real fraudsters were raking it in, with drugs gangs getting payouts, and many of the people who benefited will never be caught.

These most recent examples of the Government’s relaxed attitude to the wasting of public funds are by no means the only cases. Best for Britain’s “scandalous spending tracker” sets out the following examples—I will list just some of them; otherwise, we could be here all afternoon, and I am sure that others want to speak—since the current inhabitant of No. 10 Downing Street came to office. It categorises them in three ways: as “crony contracts”, “duff deals” and “outrageous outgoings”.

Here are a few highlights: £11 million on blue passports; over half a million on chauffeuring Government documents, never mind Government Ministers; £56 million contracting to big consulting firms outside tendering processes; £29 million on the festival of Brexit; £900,000 painting a plane; £900,000 researching a bridge to Ireland, which I could have saved the Government money on, because I did a second-year geography project—at high school, not university—that could have told them it was a ropey idea; £32 million on unusable PPE suits; over £38 million on a test and trace contract that was not fulfilled; £10 billion on a failed test and trace system; over £300 million on expired PPE, and billions more on contracts for friends and family of Ministers and Conservative party donors through the fast-track lane.

All that totalled £25 billion, and all of it at a time when the screw was being tightened on those who have the least, with cuts to universal credit, some getting no money at all, and more effort spent chasing down those who happened to wrongly claim child benefit than those who deliberately defrauded the public purse to the tune of billions.

I find it difficult to understand why the Government are so careless with our money and why they do not want to act on fraud and money laundering. The question “who benefits?” continues to rattle around in my head. While those on the Government Benches do not like the inference that it was them and their chums, I wonder whether the fact that this coincides with the undermining of the Electoral Commission and the relaxing of the rules on overseas donors is any kind of accident. It is not just me; the Centre for American Progress flagged recently:

“Uprooting Kremlin-linked oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom’s ruling conservative party, the press, and its real estate and financial industry.”

This should worry us all, but it does not seem to worry those on the Government Benches.

Lord Agnew’s estimate of the total fraud loss across UK Government Departments is £29 billion per year. That could go, as he suggested, to tax cuts or, as we on the SNP Benches would argue for, to investment in public services and increases in social security. Either way, there is a cost to this fraud, and it remains absolutely baffling that this UK Government have continued to let it go on their watch.

Rating (Coronavirus) and Directors Disqualification (Dissolved Companies) Bill

Debate between Peter Grant and Alison Thewliss

Report stage & 3rd reading
Thursday 9th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

I am pleased to make a brief contribution to the debate. As I did at earlier stages, I will restrict my comments to the disqualification of directors, which is the only aspect of the Bill that extends directly to Scotland.

The SNP supports the Bill. Our concerns are the same as those of the official Opposition: that much, much more is needed than is included. We need a much more comprehensive set of regulations, not so much to protect shareholders and directors as to protect customers, members of the public and investors from the scams that have all too often been committed by companies whose shareholders are the directors. A lot of company legislation was designed to protect investors against misaction or misconduct by company directors who are different people, but we are now looking at companies whose directors are the shareholders. They are not going to defraud themselves, but sometimes they may be willing to defraud others.

At earlier stages, I have repeatedly mentioned the conduct of a group of companies called Blackmore Bond and its directors Phillip Nunn and Patrick McCreesh. I will not go over even a fraction of their history, but why they were not at least investigated for disqualification long, long ago is beyond me. The Bill will not make it easier for such directors to be called to order, so we need legislation that fills in the gaps that are left.

As an indication of just how current such behaviour is, the BBC reported as recently as Monday that DialADeal Scotland Ltd has been fined £150,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office for making more than half a million illegal marketing calls, many to numbers that had explicitly opted out of such calls. DialADeal Scotland Ltd used false business names in its marketing, which is illegal. It disguised the number that it was calling from so that people could not phone back to complain, which is also illegal. The calls were about non-existent green deal energy savings schemes. That is not a telecoms offence; it is fraud or attempted fraud, and very probably conspiracy to defraud.

The fine was decided in September 2021, but clearly the action by the Information Commissioner’s Office started before then. In May 2021, the directors of the company, Calum Mckay Kirkpatrick and Yvonne Mccuaig, applied to Companies House to place the company in voluntary liquidation—almost certainly with the sole purpose of avoiding the financial penalty that they knew was coming their way, because if the company were dissolved before the order was made, its directors would get off scot-free. Fortunately, the Information Commissioner’s Office was able to lodge an objection with Companies House and the voluntary strike-off action has been suspended.

The same two individuals, Kirkpatrick and Mccuaig, were also directors of DialADealUK Ltd, which was voluntarily dissolved in September 2018, immediately before DialADeal Scotland Ltd was created. Coincidentally, shortly after they had started the process of winding up DialADeal Scotland Ltd, they set up another company called Simple Lead Ltd. Not one of those companies has ever filed a set of accounts with Companies House; DialADeal Scotland’s accounts are now over a year out of date.

Why is it that company directors can repeatedly avoid any kind of scrutiny? As I have mentioned in relation to Nunn and McCreesh’s companies, they can go for years and years without filing the very limited information that they have to file at Companies House, which just does not seem able to keep up.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point about Companies House and its limitations. Does he share my concern that the UK Government just do not care enough about Companies House and the massive loopholes that they are leaving for people to be defrauded and company directors to get away scot-free with the wrong things that they are up to?

[Peter Grant]

That would certainly be many people’s interpretation of how long it has taken the Government to take any firm action. We keep being promised a comprehensive review of company legislation; it cannot come quickly enough. I hope that we will finally see an end to the scandal of the creatures called Scottish limited partnerships, which are too often set up purely as a means to fund organised crime.

Companies House needs to be reformed and probably better resourced. As the Opposition spokesperson—the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith)—mentioned, the Bill may place additional demands on the resources of the Insolvency Service. We know that the Financial Conduct Authority needs another complete sorting out. Either it is not doing its job or it has not been asked to do the right job; it probably does not have the resources to deal with fraud on the scale that is now going on right under our nose.

Although I welcome the Bill and we will certainly not oppose it—we have supported it all the way through—we look for assurances from the Government that it is not the end of the road. It can only be allowed to be one tiny step towards finally stopping these people. I remember one of the witnesses who gave evidence to the Bill Committee describing the United Kingdom as becoming one of the go-to places of choice for international fraudsters. That is not a badge that any of us should bear with honour. If that badge is applied to the financial services industry, and to the business community in the United Kingdom generally, it will take years—decades—to get rid of and honest businesses will suffer desperately.

The Government have to start to act now. I do not know whether the Minister is in a position to tell us today when the comprehensive review of company regulation will come forward, but I certainly hope that we will see it very soon. As DialADeal’s example makes clear, even since we started our consideration of the Bill, further scams have been inflicted on innocent people throughout these islands.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.