Leading last year’s G8 in Lough Erne, David Cameron said that the agenda for the world’s most powerful nations should focus on trade, tax and transparency. While some progress has been made, there is of course a lot more to do – as last week’s headlines about tax-dodging popstars serve to illustrate.

The House of Commons has led calls for reform. From the public accounts committee’s interrogation of Amazon, Starbucks and Google to the international development committee’s inquiry into improving tax collection in developing countries, members of parliament from across the political spectrum have been calling on the British government and businesses based here to show real leadership.

This Wednesday the ‘three Ts’ return to the House of Commons, albeit under the guise of the second reading of the small business, enterprise and employment bill. Among the many provisions of this bill are measures to establish the first public register of beneficial ownership – not only the first in the United Kingdom, but the first in the world.

The 2013 G8 Declaration stated that ‘companies should know who really owns them and tax collectors and law enforcers should be able to obtain this information easily’, with the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills committing itself last autumn to introducing a publicly accessible register of information on who controls UK companies.

It is hoped that the register will help reduce tax avoidance, corruption and money-laundering: companies can, and do, currently use complicated networks of trusts and shells to hide their true ownership and wealth. The move has been welcomed by development charities, but some have called for the proposals to be tightened. Christian Aid, for example, which claims that between $120bn and $160bn – more than the entire aid budget – is lost annually from tax revenues through illicit financial flows, has said that sanctions and checks on compliance must be more robust.

It has said that it is unclear how the government intends to verify information supplied for the register – although it could be cross-checked with other databases such as the electoral roll and DVLA. Meanwhile, the government has said that entries should be updated annually, but Christian Aid is calling for any changes to the ownership of a company to be altered on the register within 14 days of them being made. Christian Aid has also noted that there is some disparity in the sanctions – from two years’ imprisonment for not having and maintaining a record to a £250-a-day fine for not providing information to the register. I hope that there is an opportunity to look into these issues in parliament this week.

It is also important that the UK does all it can to encourage other countries to introduce robust public registers of beneficial ownership; Australia has put the issue on the agenda for the next G8 summit in Brisbane in November and the European Union is negotiating its fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive which will set out EU-wide rules on beneficial ownership. While the European parliament has supported calls for public registers, the council of ministers has suggested there are other options.

In June the prime minister made a statement to the House of Commons after the G7’s meeting in Brussels. In the questions that followed I asked Cameron what progress had been made in getting the crown dependencies and overseas territories to sign up. He replied that: ‘we should commend them for the work that they have done to bring their arrangements up to date. I had this conversation with them almost exactly this time last year … They have made huge steps forward and we should commend them for that and encourage them to go further.’

The reality, however, is that while the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Montserrat have consulted or are consulting on introducing registers on beneficial ownership, all the other crown dependencies and overseas territories are yet to do so. Contrary to the prime minister’s answer, the UK appears to be going it alone.

I raised the issue with the business secretary, Vince Cable, at BIS questions in the Commons. Accepting the gap between the prime minister’s answer and reality, he answered: ‘Of course there are issues with our offshore territories. We are not a colonial power that can send in gunboats to solve these problems; we rely on persuasion, and that is what we will do’. Given the prime minister’s botched attempt to ‘persuade’ the EU to reject Jean-Claude Juncker as commission president, the government may need to reconsider its approach to negotiation.

The crown dependencies and overseas territories are, of course, self-governing, but the UK maintains a constitutional role in overseeing good governance in their arrangements and the reality is that the British government can advocate and influence.

The government’s proposals to step out of the shadows on company ownership should be welcomed; but if trade, tax and transparency are to firmly be on the global agenda then we can and should be doing more to show international leadership on tackling phantom firms.

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Fiona O’Donnell is member of parliament for East Lothian and a member of the international development committee. She tweets @FionaODonnellMP

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Photo: taxbrackets.org