Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 21 November 1973.
Hon. Richard Wood
, Bridlington
12:00,
21 November 1973
With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I would like to make a further statement on the Crown Agents. In my statement last year, I said that I welcomed the findings of Sir Matthew Stevenson's Committee, that the interests of the Crown Agents' principals and others would best be served by the continuation of the whole range of services which the Crown Agents provide. I also accepted recommendations that the status, structure and responsibility for the Crown Agents should be clearly defined, and that they should bear an appropriate liability to taxation.
The Crown Agents originally came into being primarily to provide certain financial and purchasing services in Britain for countries which were then dependent. The range of their services, conducted on a non-profit making basis and contributing to the development of the countries concerned, has been progressively made available to a large number of countries, most of them now independent. The scope of their activities has also been extended to cover a wide range of technical and financial services.
The Crown Agents have adapted their organisation and structure over the years in order to meet these widening requirements, and in particular have established certain of their services on the basis of fully-owned subsidiary companies staffed by Crown Agents' personnel. In the light of the Stevenson Report, I have agreed that this process should be extended by the establishment of further wholly-owned subsidiary companies to deal with the specialised financial services of the Crown Agents. The boards of management of those companies will include non-executive directors appointed after consultation with me, as well as executive directors drawn from the Crown Agents' staff. The Crown Agents intend that the investment policy pursued by these companies should be generally in accord with the trustee analogy and should be fully consistent with their name and standing. These subsidiary companies will be subject to taxation in the normal way, and arrangements are also being made to bring any profits which may be made by the headquarters' organisation itself within the scope of normal taxation.
The Crown Agents will, as in the past, be appointed by the Secretary of State, or by myself acting on his behalf, for the purpose of carrying out the various services on behalf of the overseas principals. They will thus remain answerable finally to Ministers, but it is neither my intention nor my desire to disturb the traditional practice under which the operations of the Crown Agents on behalf of their overseas principals have been discharged on a basis of non-Intervention by Ministers.
In the future, as in the past, the scale and scope of the Crown Agents' operations will depend on the confidence which overseas governments and authorities repose in the organisation. That confidence is fully reflected in the present scale of operations, and I am particularly anxious that the arrangements I have mentioned, which are designed to produce a more readily comprehensible structure and to define the various functions more clearly, should in no way disturb that confidence. I have made this clear to the main overseas principals when I told them the outline of the new arrangements.
Finally, I should once again like to take this opportunity of thanking Sir Matthew Stevenson and his Committee for its report, and of sincerely endorsing the tributes which it paid to the work of the Crown Agents.
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