Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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“These things—or some of them—may arrive tomorrow but we do not know yet. We as a Committee wanted to set out the seven things we would like to see in those strategies, so that we could mark the autumn statement, and the House would have a way of judging whether the Minister’s strategy is what the country needs. First, we cannot escape the fact that public subsidies will be needed. American cash for battery firms could total $150 billion over the next 10 years, which is an enormous amount of subsidy, while European subsidies are at around three times what we are currently providing. By contrast, the UK’s automotive transformation fund has just £850 million, and some of that has been burgled for other purposes.”
“Right now, we have online just 2 GW of capacity and deals in place that cover barely half the capacity we will need. We conclude in our report that the Government have done well to reinforce this country’s strengths in battery research and development—we are, after all, the nation of Faraday. We also conclude that the lack of a stable, long-term industrial strategy has hampered our ability to secure long-term investment. As a country, we have real competitive advantages. We could harness the UK’s low-carbon energy sources to ensure that we become a global frontrunner in making sustainable and ethical batteries. I am conscious that tomorrow is a big day for the Minister—she has just arrived back from Kazakhstan, and I am grateful she could join us today. We know that an advanced manufacturing plan and a UK battery strategy are coming.”
“If we do not do that, we risk becoming dependent on imports from China, where, as we know, there are questions about the integrity of the supply chain and the labour that is used. The challenge the Committee wants to flag is that we are now falling behind our competitors and need to take steps urgently to create a better environment for electric vehicle battery production. We have a huge gigafactory gap; the estimates are quite widely developed in the industry and academia, but even under the Minister’s own estimates, we are going to need about 100 GW of manufacturing capacity just to supply the automotive industry for us by 2030. But the demands will be much greater than that, because there will be all sorts of other applications too.”
“Just as power was at the heart of the industrial revolution all those centuries ago, so power will be at the heart of the green industrial revolution in the years to come. Our nation has to move fast now to transform the battery industry, to create jobs, and to safeguard the 165,000 workers in the automotive industry and the other 800,000 in the supply chain. Batteries are big and heavy, and they are expensive to move around. We have to wake up to the risk that, if we do not build the gigafactories that make those batteries here in this country, our great automotive factories will up sticks and move to where the gigafactories are being built—perhaps in the United States or Europe.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am grateful to the Liaison Committee for making time available for this statement today. I understand that the Backbench Business Committee was reinstituted last night, so Select Committees and their Chairs will now have the opportunity to make applications to it, but I am grateful for the time granted by the Liaison Committee today. When the great steam engine tycoon Matthew Boulton, who was from my neck of the woods, in Birmingham, welcomed people to the Soho manufactory—the first great steam engine factory in the world—he used to say, “I make here, Sir, what all the world desires—power,” and he was right.”
“That was one reason why we stated it so clearly as a requirement in our conclusions—so that the Government now have to go on the record to explain to the House, and indeed the country, precisely what they are doing.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend. As ever, he is on the money. The rules of origin framework was put in place with the best intentions, to try to incentivise people in Europe and the United Kingdom to get gigafactory investments in place, but that has not yet happened. We have a looming gigafactory gap in this country, and if we do not negotiate an extension to the rules of origin, we will have tariffs of up to 10% on some of our exports, which will have a really serious impact on hundreds of thousands of jobs. Given how much is at stake and how many jobs are in peril, we were surprised to see almost no news about where the renegotiation of the rules of origin had got to.”
“But the broad point is that we cannot be producing batteries simply for the automotive industry; we need a wide range of applications for them in the future. Once we have designated the sites, we need to think about how industrial policy helps to unlock the wide range of policy levers that any place will need. That includes access to low-cost electricity, skills, and incentives and subsidies to get factories built in the first place. Of course, we then need the trading arrangements, so that people can export and we can ensure that the export of EV batteries is a real growth sector for our economy. The point the hon. Member for Strangford made is therefore absolutely the right one, and we have sought to provide the checklist of things he needs to be asking of Ministers.”
“I am grateful for that question. Although I do not have the specific details of the opportunities in the constituency of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), the spirit of the Committee’s report is that we need to be using industrial policy to do three things: to de-risk supply chains, to decarbonise, and to decentralise the sources of economic growth. That is why we are so clear about the need for the Government to designate strategically critical sites for gigafactories in the future. As to quite how many we need, the Minister and I may have different views, but we know how much capacity we need, and that can perhaps be delivered by between five and eight gigafactories, depending on how much each factory can produce.”
“I am afraid that the Committee came to the conclusion that the lack of an industrial policy has hampered our ability to secure the needed investment. It is not too late to catch up. There is a real risk that we cannot win a subsidy race with the United States, or indeed Europe, so we will need a smart policy framework—the seven things I set out. They include devolved funding on skills and guarantees around infrastructure and low-cost energy access. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that there is a niche—in the global market, it is a huge niche—for the UK to provide, build and sell batteries built with low-carbon energy and with the highest levels of integrity right through the supply chain. That is a big opportunity for the UK, which we should be seizing with both hands.”
“I commend my hon. Friend’s work; his leadership of the all-party parliamentary group on electric vehicles and the all-party parliamentary motor group has been so important in ensuring that we in Parliament can benefit from informed debate. We are two to three years behind our European competition, and we therefore have to move quickly to catch up. The lack of certainty has damaged confidence—moving the goalposts on phasing out petrol engines, for example, has hurt confidence. Ultimately, despite the public investment that needs to go into building things such as gigafactories, the investment overwhelmingly comes from the private sector, and when we damage confidence, we damage the speed of that private investment.”
“Those are practical steps that we could work on together—otherwise we end up with all mission and no model, which will not help the world’s poorest.”
“The right hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, knows that I admire much about the mission he has set out in this White Paper, but chapter 3 needed to say a lot more about the money. He could have said more about doubling the fraction of the special drawing rights we share, as Japan is doing, which would have provided an extra £4 billion of development assistance. He could have said more about using the money we get back from the European Investment Bank to invest in building a bigger World Bank in order to unlock $200 billion of concessional lending over the decade ahead. He could have said more about leading a global initiative to keep the interest rate on special drawing rights down so that the International Monetary Fund remains as lender of last resort, rather than China.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Holly Mumby-Croft) for securing this urgent question. The Minister is in peril of presiding over the end of primary steelmaking in this country and the curtain falling on 300 years of Britain’s industrial history. The announcement comes at a time when an analysis shows that the Department’s budget is set for a 16% real-terms cut in the years ahead. Is it the policy of His Majesty’s Government that blast furnaces will stay in operation in our country and that we will not be dependent on imports of primary steel? When can we expect a conclusion to the negotiations and some safeguarding of the vital industry either at Tata or at British Steel?”
“We are grateful to the Minister for his tireless work, but by his own analysis the aid is not getting through. I commend to him the motion passed by Birmingham City Council last night that calls for an immediate ceasefire binding on all sides, because it is the best way to save the hostages, get aid through, and let the war crimes inspectors do their work. I support that position. I do not think that he does, but could he tell us under what conditions the British Government would shift from a policy of supporting humanitarian pauses to a strategy of supporting an immediate ceasefire?”
“It was a point underlined when we heard public evidence on the Bill. People explained to us how a number of different smaller companies might well be set up to become conduits for fraud.”
“Friend said, we already have a regime in this country that bestows some important responsibilities on directors, including the failure to prevent bribery and the failure to prevent tax evasion. Therefore, there are already important regulatory requirements on directors, which we as a House have judged to be essential to keep our economy clean. Asking those directors to take one more responsibility, which is to prevent fraud, is not a significant extra burden.”
“I know what it is like to grow a business from two people around a table to a multi-million pound enterprise that employs lots people. I know about the responsibilities on company directors, but we grant special privileges to company directors in this country and we grant special privileges to companies. That regime was introduced in 1855. When Viscount Palmerston moved that legislation through the House, he said that the Limited Liability Act 1855 was important, because it would act for the common good of the country. Yet, if we have a regime that does not ensure that directors have responsibilities that match those privileges, frankly, that common good is undermined. As my right hon.”
“A quarter of a trillion pounds of foreign direct investment has come into Britain from UK offshore accounts, dictatorships and countries that are only partially free. Overwhelmingly, I am sure, that money is clean and good, but we all know in this House that some of it is not. We have a responsibility in this place to make sure that our regime for policing corrupt money is as strong as it possibly can be. This Bill, although it makes progress, still leaves weaknesses in the argument. The Minister has based his arguments more recently on whether we are creating undue, over-burdensome costs to business. Like him, I was in business previously—I was in the wrong place at the wrong time—and was elected to this place in 2004.”
“Friend said, that unfortunately this country is now one of the two global centres for money laundering and fraud. That is a badge of shame. There are think-tanks in places such as Washington that now write reports about what they call the UK kleptocracy problem. That is because we have left our financial services and Companies House too weak to police what is a growing problem. To underline how fast the risk to our country is growing, I asked the House of Commons Library to look at the amount of foreign direct investment that was coming into our country. Foreign direct investment comes into Britain through companies that are set up at a moment’s notice, from UK offshore accounts, from dictatorships and from countries that are only partially free, and the reality is that that money has grown fivefold since 2010.”
“When I look at that manifesto, which we launched together in Westminster Abbey not too long ago, I see that this Bill covers a fair number of its proposals, but not all of them. That is why something of a mystery still hangs over the Chamber today, and that mystery is that we know that the Minister probably wanted to go much further in this Bill. He has been collegiate enough not to explain to us, either in public or in private, just how his hands were tied and why he has pulled his punches on so many of the policy proposals, including those that we are debating this afternoon. I want to underline why the “failure to prevent” clauses are so important and why the responsibility for failing to prevent fraud and money laundering should apply to all companies, not just 9% of UK plc. We know, as my right hon.”
“I rise to speak in favour of the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), which gives me an opportunity to thank her for her extraordinary leadership on this agenda. Our country is safer and stronger for the work that she has helped lead in this House over a long period. Like other right hon. and hon. Members, I am grateful to the Minister for ensuring that, by and large, we have approached this Bill in the spirit of compromise. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that, unfortunately, the Bill arrived in this place in a sorry state. Of course, the best way to examine that is to look at the fantastic manifesto of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, which, of course, the Minister used to co-chair.”
“All we ask in this amendment is for the Minister to face the facts. He should bring the facts together, put them in a report, assess them, analyse them and present some conclusions to the House. How can we have a situation where the Minister is essentially asking for the freedom to look away? That simply cannot be the basis of good policy. I am grateful to my new colleagues on the Business and Trade Committee who agreed yesterday that we will ask representatives of Companies House to come before us for hearings. Frankly, if the Minister is not prepared to put the facts around fraud in one place, I shall ask the Select Committee to do the job for him.”
“The Minister said that the proposal would be a cost to British business that we could not withstand or sustain, but the truth is that, while it might be a cost to some British businesses, it would also be a saving to British business, to the British economy and to British taxpayers, because it is always cheaper and more effective to prevent fraud in the first place than to have to police it or to prosecute fraud after the event. When 64% of businesses—small businesses—in this country are victims of fraud, we can only imagine how widespread that cost of fraud has now become. That average is much higher than international averages and therefore there is an additional argument that we need to go that one step further to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to prevent fraud from arising in the first place.”
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is a point of cross-party consensus. I know it is a point of cross-party consensus because it was the Minister who used to use precisely the same argument to argue for some of the changes that we see in the Bill. We all know that our country does well, because, by and large, we have a reputation for clean trade around the world. When companies file and incorporate in this country, that is a credential that does them well around the world. That is a credential that we must do everything in this House to protect, which is why the amendment is so important. We cannot leave a weakness in our armour as crime and fraud multiplies.”
“Hamas’s crime was not just what was once called “the banality of evil”; it was the calculation of evil, which is why Hamas must be defeated. The Prime Minister is right that a humanitarian disaster is unfolding in Gaza. That is why he is right to say that we need a constant stream of aid pouring in. The UN Secretary-General is very clear that only a binding-on-all-sides negotiated cessation of hostilities will allow that aid to pour in as the Prime Minister said. Is the UN Secretary-General wrong, and if he is not what will the Prime Minister do at the United Nations to bring about that binding-on-all-sides negotiated ceasefire so that aid can flow and lives can be saved?”
“We know that the United States and Egypt are working hard to secure that, so it would be good for us to understand how the UK Government are helping to achieve that objective.”
“I join the Leader of the House in her utter condemnation of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel. It was not what Hannah Arendt once called “the banality of evil”; it was the calculation of evil. That is why it is right that we defend Israel’s right to self-defence. Like the shadow Leader of the House and colleagues across the House, I am acutely concerned that 2.2 million Palestinians now face humanitarian disaster. The Prime Minister was right to say in his statement: “We must ensure that humanitarian support urgently reaches civilians in Gaza.” —[ Official Report , 16 October 2023; Vol. 738, c. 24.] What is the best way for us to debate the strategy next week? It seems to many of us in this House that an urgent, negotiated cessation of hostilities, binding on all sides, will be required to ensure that we meet the Prime Minister’s objective.”
“There is a conversation to be had about funding, and I am grateful that the Secretary of State is considering one way to fix it, by creating a levelling-up zone and investment zones in east Birmingham, on land between the two High Speed 2 stations. Can the Secretary of State confirm that those plans will still go ahead? Has he considered creating a development corporation in east Birmingham, for which I have argued for a long time, to lever in significantly larger amounts of money? Can we have a conversation about how we support the combined authority, too? As he will know, Andy Street’s budget faces a gap of £29 million next year, rising to £50 million in a couple of years’ time, and currently there is a £1.1 billion black hole between the investment programme and the funds available to pay for it.”
“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for the offer to work together, and that offer has been welcomed by Councillor John Cotton this afternoon. Can the Secretary of State tell us whether we can find a way to have a conversation about fair funding? He is a student of Tory leadership campaigns and, like us, he probably winced when he heard the Prime Minister say to one campaign meeting: “we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas…that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.” The truth is that richer councils have taken cuts of about £44 per head since 2010, whereas Birmingham City Council has taken cuts of 14 times that amount.”
“The truth is that while gigafactories are now being built right the way across Europe, we need at least eight gigafactories with about 15 GW of capacity in the UK—including, I might say, one in the heart of the west midlands, which is home to about a third of UK automotive production. In the last Metro Mayor election, both the Conservative Mayor, Andy Street, and I promised that we would get that gigafactory built; it is still a large open space. When does the Minister anticipate those eight gigafactories being built in the UK? When does she anticipate a gigafactory coming to the Coventry airport site? If we fail, our automotive industry will be hit with tariffs soon and we will put 114,000 jobs in jeopardy.”
“I am grateful for that reassurance, because this is one question on which both the Conservative Mayor and I would be happy to come and lobby on behalf of the west midlands. The point is that we are told that we need 130 GW of capacity in the UK by 2040. Now, that may be eight sites or it may be more or fewer, but the key thing is that we cannot see a plan for the UK getting that capacity in place, unless the Minister gets up and tell us that there is a plan that she is about to reveal.”
“There are, of course, proposals by Chinese battery makers to consider investing in the UK. Can the Minister tell the House whether, if investments are made by those Chinese firms, the cars we make with those products will still be allowed to be exported tariff-free and will not get caught by new tariffs because of the amount of foreign content they might contain?”
“New analysis from the House of Commons Library that I am publishing today shows that since 2010 our trade with dictatorships has grown by over £135 billion and that it is growing twice as fast as our trade with the free world. Trade dependence on dictatorships is a risk, so when will the Minister set out a plan to define and de-risk our critical supply chains and begin growing our trade with nations that are free?”
“On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. The inexplicable delay in counting votes has now risked denying the House a vote on ensuring that this Bill to tackle economic crime is as strong as it could be. Will you therefore advise the House on what action we can now take to ensure that in the debates that lie ahead we can come back to this question and make sure we have the right provisions in place in statute and that this country is no longer a soft touch for economic crime?”
“The world leads a bigger World Bank now, and the UK should be leading the case.”
“May I first associate myself with the sympathies extended to the people of Morocco? I welcome the language in paragraph 50 of the G20 communiqué about building a bigger World Bank. The truth is that we need to triple the lending of multilateral development banks if we are to mobilise the climate finance that the world now needs, and we cannot do that simply by building a better World Bank; we need to build a bigger World Bank. In the United States, President Biden is asking Congress to support a capital call and boost the balance sheet of the World Bank. Why is the UK, one of the founders of the World Bank, not leading the same argument? We could even use the money we are getting back from the European Investment Bank, and the Prime Minister, if he so chose, could call it a Brexit dividend.”
“If we genuinely want to be able to investigate where things are going wrong, where there is corruption, surely it is in the national interest for us to make that information more widely available.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for his thanks for the progress we have made together on SLAPPs. Because of the amendment made on SLAPPs, we are now providing journalists and other truth-tellers with important protections when it comes to investigating economic crime. The Lords amendment is a complement to that. The truth is, there will never be enough enforcement resources for Companies House, HMRC and others, so we do need civil society to be able to bring the disinfectant of sunlight and undertake investigations. It is therefore vital that trust information is provided. Has he seen the new research published by Arun Advani, Andy Summers and their colleagues that shows that the current arrangements shield something like 152,000 properties from that transparency?”
“The Minister has wisely equipped himself with an order-making power, which he referred to earlier. He told the House that he plans to undertake a consultation. It would be of comfort to some in the House—not to all—if he could tell us when he plans to launch that consultation and, in his own mind, when he would like the consultation to be implemented through the power with which he has equipped himself.”
“Is there not a risk that clever people who are corrupt will just set up a whole hive of small businesses with a turnover below £35 million, to circumvent the safeguards that we are all trying to put in place?”
“The Minister is being characteristically generous. I, too, respect what he is trying to do with the regulatory burden. I have taken a business from two people and a business plan and grown it into a multi-million pound organisation, so I respect what he is trying to do on regulation. However, does he not risk the growth of businesses with a turnover just below £36 million—perhaps £35 million—explicitly set up to be the conduits for bad behaviour? He will remember at the public Bill evidence sessions that representatives from the financial services community told us about the way in which money came into a bank and was split up between several different organisations and their bank accounts to blur what was really going on before the money went on to be laundered.”
“If we have learned anything from tackling economic crime, passing tougher sanctions legislation and voting for new budgets for our law enforcers, we surely have to recognise the reality that we cannot have a situation where we do not know who owns what.”
“The London School of Economics report from Andy Summers, Arun Advani and their colleagues is compelling reading, and I am interested in the Minister’s take on it. The report states that we are missing information about more than 70% of the 152,000 properties that are owned by trusts standing behind overseas entities, which means that “even law enforcement agencies do not know the true identities of the beneficial owners.” That is of real concern, especially when we know how many billions in wealth are owned in this country by people who are bad actors and who made their money by, frankly, stealing it from people abroad.”
“We know that it is not yet job done and that there is further to go, but free speech will be freer because of the provisions in the Bill. We need now to work together to finish a job that is almost complete; we need to ensure that, for once and for all, we end the ludicrous secrecy around trusts; we need to strengthen the declarations of nominees so that we truly know who owns what; we need to ensure that failure to prevent fraud is something that bites on 100% of companies and does not provide carte blanche for 99% of companies to behave without that obligation; and we need to defend our law enforcers and equip them with the tools that they need to police the legislation that we plan on passing tonight and in the days and weeks to come. I will underline three points very quickly, Mr Deputy Speaker. The first is about secrecy.”
“We have already passed an Elections Act that did not put in place tough enough safeguards on the kind of money that could be used to elect people to this House. We risked an Elections Act too weak to protect our democracy from dirty money, and tonight we risk compounding the error by failing to ensure that we have an Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill strong, tough and robust enough to stop our economy being polluted by dirty money. The Bill is welcome, and the Minister has done a good job. He has taken forward many of the ideas that have been discussed for a long time on all sides of the House. I am particularly grateful to him for the way in which he has used the Bill, in the SLAPP clauses, to put in place protections for truth-tellers.”
“It is a problem that we potentially allow the ownership of more than 100,000 of our most prestigious and expensive properties by names we just do not know. It is a problem that, last year alone, nearly £7 billion of property was bought with what Transparency International calls “suspicious wealth”. What unites us all in this debate—indeed, what unites us all in this House—is that we know that, if we want to be a country of free trade, we have to be a country of fair trade. But if we are to be a country of fair trade, we need to be a country of clean trade, and that is why the Bill, and getting it right, is so important. When we leave holes, gaps and spaces in our defences, dirty money floods through and pollutes both our economy and our democracy.”
“However, it is not yet perfect, and we are here tonight to encourage him, having gone so far, just to go those final few yards and give us a Bill that will truly be a legacy to his work here in Parliament. Mine is a starting point that we have not yet talked about in this debate: the terrible state of wealth inequality in this country. It is so bad because economic crime is so bad. Since 2010, the wealth of the top 1% in this country has multiplied by 31 times that of the rest of us. That is, in part, because of the problem of economic crime. It is a problem that our country is a global capital of money laundering and fraud reckoned to be worth some £350 billion a year—that is a mark of national shame.”
“I rise to endorse 100% the brilliant speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). Let me take this moment to pay tribute to her stalwart leadership of this agenda over a long time. Our country is a better and fairer place thanks to her extraordinary work. The Minister is not too bad, either. I think that he has done a Herculean job over quite a long time, and he has sought to do the right thing with the Bill. Crucially, he took the time to reach out and listen to members of the Committee and Members across the House to ensure that we were up to speed with where he was going and what he was trying to achieve. The result is a better piece of legislation.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Is he aware that the delays to the transport plans do not simply affect the stations at the centre of this debate? In Mr Street’s manifesto, he promised that work would begin on the east Birmingham tramline, connecting Digbeth through the poorest communities in the country out to Solihull, ensuring that the land between the two new high-speed stations was connected with a tram? Yet there is absolutely no sign of that work taking place either. There is no sign of the Arden Cross hospital that was promised and, as my hon. Friend rightly says, there appears to be a £1.2 billion hole in the investment programme. Are people in the west midlands right to conclude that this is a mayor who, frankly, promises but never delivers?”