During the last Labour government, Chancellor Alistair Darling and Prime Minister Gordon Brown criticised the Crown Dependencies and made threatening noises.

They commissioned the Foot Report on the issue, which soon shut them up.

It concluded:

The Crown Dependencies make a significant contribution to the liquidity of the UK market, providing net financing to UK banks of $332.5bn;

The Crown Dependencies have good frameworks for tackling money laundering and terrorist financing, as recognised by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF);

All Crown Dependencies had met the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) standard for tax transparency by the G20 meeting in April 2009, and are encouraged to continue to negotiate further TIEAs;

The UK ’tax gap’ due to suspected tax avoidance is significantly lower than previous estimates - rather than £11.8bn previously claimed, this is now estimated to be no more than £2bn globally (with any avoidance through offshore centres being an unidentified component of this).