Professor Robert Barrington reflects on the UK government’s plans for the upcoming Lammy Summit, drawing on past examples to consider what the initiative might signal about current efforts to address corruption and illicit finance.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced in May 2024 that if he were to be elected, he would be ‘hosting a summit of allies and international financial centres to launch a sustained initiative to tackle dirty money.  Driving a powerful agenda on tackling corruption and money laundering.’

This theme made it into the Labour Party manifesto: ‘Labour will also work with our allies and international financial centres to tackle corruption and money laundering, including in Britain, Crown Dependencies, and in British Overseas Territories.’

In November 2024, he launched ‘the start of a new campaign by the Foreign Secretary to clamp down on corruption and illicit finance.’  And in June 2025, it was finally confirmed that the Summit promised in opposition would take place: ‘I can announce today that London will host a Countering Illicit Finance Summit bringing together a broad coalition for action.  I will never allow London mansions to be the bitcoin of kleptocrats. We will expose them. We will punish them. And drive them out of our city.’

The sharp-eyed reader will notice that the ambition to tackle ‘corruption’ appeared in the first three statements, but not the Summit announcement.  Between May 2024 and June 2025 the Summit’s ambition seems to have changed from ‘Driving a powerful agenda on tackling corruption and money laundering’ to ‘Countering Illicit Finance.’

There is sufficient vagueness in these terms (if in doubt, have a look at the Dictionary of Corruption) that there may have been no change in scope or ambition.  We do not yet know.  But anti-corruption experts are already feeling that the Labour government has form in backing off anti-corruption promises and giving in to vested interests.  It took months to appoint an Anti-Corruption Champion.  The national Anti-Corruption Strategy has still not been published, a year after taking office.  There is no sign of the manifesto pledge to create an Ethics & Integrity Commission to control corruption in politics.  And most telling of all, the ‘Covid Corruption Commissioner’ (also in the manifesto)  was downgraded to a part-time, one year post looking for fraud, while steering away from the more controversial territory of corruption.

All this brings into question what Mr Lammy’s Countering Illicit Finance Summit will actually be about.  It could be about subjects like the use of crypto-currencies by organised crime or the role of gold as a safe haven for criminal assets.  Those subjects are important, but in the context of Lammy’s stated ambition to address corruption and kleptocracy, they are essentially unambitious and peripheral.   A narrow and unambitious approach would have echoes of the Covid Corruption Commissioner – the Foreign Secretary perhaps seeing his wings clipped by other departments who have yet to be persuaded by his vision.

What might an ambitious approach look like?  We do not have to look far for an example.  The Cameron-sponsored global Anti-Corruption Summit held in London in 2016 was a high water mark in the UK’s leadership in the field, and powered a series of successful initiatives that are still bearing fruit both globally and in the UK, including beneficial ownership transparency, open contracting, the UK’s overseas property register, the IACCC,the UK’s first anti-corruption strategy and legislation to introduce unexplained wealth orders.  It gave a boost to international action, such as the anti-corruption strategy at the IMF.  Participating countries were offered a wide range of options from which they could select their own commitments, which were annexed to the more generic summit communique. The ideas were crowdsourced from around the world, with civil society playing a central role.

Some of the civil servants involved did not like this much.  The ambition was felt to be overwhelming, and it was only strong leadership from No10 that pushed things through.  But the ambition, combined with practical initiatives, was precisely what marked out the 2016 Summit from the formal processes like UNCAC that had been consistently failing to deliver progress.

Winding forward to the Lammy Summit, there are plenty of ambitious ideas in circulation: from wholesale FATF reform and adapting US/Italian anti-mafia laws to tackle kleptocracy, to making big progress on ‘professional enablers’ and introducing a transparency levy.

The FCDO will have lots of questions to grapple with: who will be invited, how should the Summit’s purpose be described, how will it mesh with other international processes, and how can other parts of HMG be brought on board?  Central to these are the question of ambition.  Will the Summit will move the dial on corruption and kleptocracy?  It can be done – that’s exactly why such Summits are held.  Lessons learned from elsewhere suggest that leadership, ambition and genuine involvement of key external stakeholders are three critical success factors.  The slightly surprising successes of the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group provide another example of what can sometimes be achieved.

It is also worth remembering that one key aspect of the 2016 Summit was the theme of the UK getting its own house in order if it were to have the credibility to talk on these matters to the rest of the world.  For the Lammy Summit, that does not just mean the City and the UK’s burgeoning network of ‘professional enablers’ – it means finally taking the action that is necessary to stop the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies being a huge loophole in the global financial system.

Expectations have been raised, but the Summit is a bit of a gamble for Mr Lammy.  It could demonstrate global leadership and make a genuine contribution to his campaign ‘to clamp down on corruption and illicit finance.’  Or it could be unambitious, too niche to dent the overall problem, and quietly (or at worst noisily) denigrated by civil society campaigners across the world.  The selection of Summit themes will be a clear signal as to where this is heading.