I am glad to follow the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), whom I believe was the Minister who said he was not happy with the progress that had been made on tackling economic crime thus far. None of us in this place are happy about the situation on economic crime.
SNP Members of course welcome this Bill, which is overdue. Many of its aspects could have been picked up in legislation years ago. Members of the anti-corruption coalition across the House have been clear in calling for more action from the UK Government on this, and all this delay has cost us very dearly; openDemocracy believes that economic crime across these islands costs us £290 billion a year—just think of the services we could all be enjoying if that money were not being plundered by those people engaging in economic crime. As with all things around dirty money, we have to ask: who benefits from this? Who benefits from action not having been taken for all these years? There is much to be done, and the panoply of agencies involved must be properly co-ordinated and resourced to tackle it.
This is a big Bill and there is a lot more that could be said. My not saying something in particular now does not discount my saying something about it later, when the Bill goes into Committee. I thank everybody who has sent briefings ahead of this Bill, because that has been incredibly useful.
The UK Government must go after not only those committing economic crimes, but those enabling it. Robust supervision and proper deterrents need to be in place for those responsible for economic crime. Directors and enablers of economic crime need to face proportionate sanctions, and effective anti-money laundering supervision needs to be carried out consistently across sectors. Legislation on economic crime needs to be futureproofed, as a failure to ensure that means that legislators are always playing catch-up with criminals. We see that particularly in the field of crypto.
As Companies House reform is a significant part of this Bill, I will start with a few red flags from the UK Government that I would like to deal with straight up. Having lots of companies on the Companies House register is not the win that Ministers often seem to think it is, mainly because a good chunk of the register is
absolute guff. It is like a kid in the playground with an impressive looking pile of football stickers for swapsies; but instead of getting an easy trade for the Kevin van Veen of your dreams, you find that the kid has a pile of doublers, triplers, old stickers from previous seasons, stickers from rugby and cricket, a few with Stormtroopers on and some they have drawn themselves. Sorting out that pile of stickers is pretty easy, but sorting out the millions of companies on the Companies House register is a much tougher task. Even the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy impact assessment, which I would draw everybody’s attention to, hints at the difficulty in unpicking the duplicates from the system. It is riddled with error, never mind the impact of those using it for nefarious purposes.
Having looked myself up on the register, it appears that I am on it three times; three different Alison Thewlisses exist out there in the world—just imagine that! The register believes I am three separate people, rather than the same person having been a director at different points in my life. The Home Secretary, who, disappointingly, has disappeared out of this place before hearing from the third party in this House, is on the register in her own name and in her maiden name, with no link to suggests that we are talking about the same person. The BEIS Secretary is on it as the director of 11 companies with his surname hyphenated and a further three companies with it unhyphenated. I am unclear what the process is by which Companies House will set about tidying up this basic type of messiness within its register. It should not just be put on individuals to fix this; there needs to be some mechanism by which it is all corrected.
The new objectives being given to Companies House are welcome—they are a step up from its being a passive recipient of duff information—but it is unclear how exactly they will work. The querying power must be a wider, separate piece of work to pick through in detail the existing register and figure out what is actually valid, rather than relying on helpful citizens such as Oliver Bullough, Graham Barrow, Richard Smith and David Leask to report in their concerns, as they often do.