My Lords, I shall try not to add too much to the hot air in the Room so that we can crack through all of this.
Free ports have historically been a magnet for illicit activity, including, and these days almost especially, money laundering. Some of the UN reports give people a sense of how large the scope of money laundering is; the reports reckon that something like $800 billion up to $2 trillion a year—2% to 5% of the world’s GDP—is put through the laundry machine. In May 2020, RUSI’s Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies said in written evidence to the International Trade Committee of the other place:
“there is evidence of criminal activity taking place in multiple freeports around the world. It often involves trade in counterfeit goods, drug trafficking, smuggling of untaxed goods or trade-based money laundering”.
By definition, free ports do not require declarations that are associated with customs, excise or tax, which are the principal ways in which transparency as to the nature of imported items, their origins, destinations and ownership, is achieved. When extensive processing of those imports is also available in the free port site,
especially when, as in this case, the processing is granted all kinds of fiscal favours, including the waiver of national insurance contributions, the lure for criminals and money launderers is very much magnified. Obviously, the more processed the illicit product, the harder it is to trace or track and the harder it is for enforcement. Exploring safeguards against illicit behaviour is the motive behind Amendment 1, which I recognise is very much a probing amendment.
I thank the Minister and his office for taking this issue seriously in our meeting last Thursday. It was a very useful meeting, and we appreciate it. The follow-up information provided has alleviated some of my concerns, because, as the email from the Treasury explained, some relevant measures were included in the freeports bidding prospectus, which says:
“the Freeport Governance Body will be required to maintain a record of all the businesses operating or applying to operate within the tax site.”
Up to date information will be held on the “beneficial owner” of each business and the body will be required to make
“reasonable efforts to verify the beneficial owner”.
This information will be made accessible to HMRC, the NCA and Border Force. However, as it stands it will not be available for public scrutiny; the Minister will correct me if I have got this wrong. HMRC will spend little effort looking at what is happening in free ports; by definition, there are no customs, duties or tax requirements. Therefore, the NCA becomes, as it were, the strongman for enforcement in this case. This led me to look at the National Crime Agency inspection report from July 2021. I will quote from the summary—it was a fairly scathing report:
“There is insufficient capacity in the investigations command to meet the demand being developed by the intelligence command and the reactive demand (such as seizures at the border).”
In other words, we have a problem. The National Crime Agency, even without the addition of free ports, is significantly underresourced and needs to upskill, although this is less to do with the capacity of the people; there is also a lack of technical resource. We are turning to that body at the same time as introducing new avenues for money laundering and other illicit behaviours.
This House and this Government have always taken the view that it is the public nature of any register of beneficial ownership that brings the necessary scrutiny and deterrence to make that register effective. The UK already has a public register of the beneficial ownership of UK companies, and the Government have promised a public register of the beneficial owners of UK property. In addition, the Government insist that they have been working very hard to achieve public registers in the overseas territories and Crown dependencies, so it seems really odd to create a new situation here where one of the primary tools will be a register of beneficial ownership that is not being made public. At the very least, this undermines those discussions with the overseas territories and the Crown dependencies.
I would very much like the Government to have a rethink and see whether they can make this information publicly available, at the very least. It would also be really helpful to know whether some additional resource
will be put into the National Crime Agency, because without that we will be on a very uncomfortable wicket in this world where money laundering is frankly a growth industry, not a declining one.