It always seems to me absurd that it costs £12 to establish a new company in Companies House. Obviously we want to make it easy for new businesses to enter the market, but £12 is absurd. We know that that gets exploited in relation to shell companies, but does it also facilitate economic crime? If we quadrupled that figure to £50, it would still not be a fortune, but we would then have a massive investment that we could put into our enforcement agencies without raising any further money through taxation. There are a whole range of mechanisms that would not have a direct impact on public spending. They may mean that the Treasury gets a little bit less than it thought it would, but they would not have a direct impact on public expenditure and we could employ them to make these enforcement agencies fit for purpose.
Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill
Proceeding contribution from
Baroness Hodge of Barking
(Labour)
in the House of Commons on Monday, 7 March 2022.
It occurred during Committee of the Whole House (HC) on Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
710 c117 
Session
2021-22
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
Subjects
Librarians' tools
Timestamp
2022-03-08 14:53:46 +0000
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