The right hon. Member makes an incredibly important point. The case reported in the press today shows people getting around the rules that we set up for very important reasons—the House should be aware of these things. This information should not have to be squirreled out by investigative journalists—as wonderful and well informed as they are. It should come to the House as a right. It should not have to be exposed. It is something we should know as elected Members in this Parliament.
On new clause 17, on PSC status and verification, it is incredibly important that there are cross-checks on identity and that we understand who those people are. One of the big holes in the system now is the lack of cross-checking and ensuring that the rules are being followed. We must ask Companies House to be more inquisitive of the information it receives, and I think new clause 17, tabled by the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell), would have that effect. It is very important that Companies House has a risk-based approach to looking at organisations and ensures that what is there is actually factual.
Moving to new clause 19, on the accounts of dissolved companies, Graham Barrow, who is the expert on many things to do with Companies House and to whom we are all very grateful, pointed out in evidence to the Bill Committee that there is such thing as a burner company, whereby a company is set up without there being a real intention of it becoming a real, live company out there trading in the world. It is set up and then disposed of, without the obligation to file any accounts, because that is done within the timescale.
New clause 19 would go some way to dealing with those burner companies. If somebody is setting up and dissolving companies—on and off, on and off all the time—it can be difficult under the current system to know that that is happening. If there is a means of examining the accounts—if those accounts exist— of dissolved companies, it might be easier to track them and establish whether any economic crime is involved within them.
As Graham Barrow often points out, companies are being set up in their hundreds every day by organisations that do not really exist—organisations with suspicious names and suspicious addresses. Hundreds of them are registered to one tiny shop or a post office box somewhere. That has to be stamped out. This is the opportunity to do so. We do not know what those companies are for, why they exist, what they will be used for, and whether it will be our constituents who will lose out as a result.
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