The hon. Member makes a valid point, as he always does. That is a parallel argument for ensuring proper supervision and regulation and then checking and disciplining people in a professional capacity so that we get rid of the bad apples right across the piece. I was thinking about lawyers, because I think that only one case has been taken by the Solicitors Regulation Authority against one firm of solicitors on implementation of AML regulation. It is pathetic how little has been done in that context.
I turn briefly to the resourcing of the regulatory enforcement agencies and new clause 20. Our failure properly to resource these agencies is a disgrace. We should all share blame for where we are to date. In the USA, Biden sees economic crime as a security issue. As we now know from Russian activity in relation to the invasion of Ukraine, it is a security issue, and yet, if we look at our records, expenditure in the USA is going up by 31%, whereas here in the UK it has been cut by 4%. That is absolutely crazy. The Americans are much more aggressive and assertive in pursuing economic crime in both the civil and criminal courts. There is the Danske bank case, and there is the HSBC case that involved the Mexican drug cartel—the Minister will know about that. In America, in 2012, HSBC was fined $1.4 billion. In Britain, by 2021—nine years later—we managed a fine of only £64 million. Let us also look at the case of Standard Chartered—a UK bank. There again, the USA fined it $842 million. What we did in the UK? A fine of £102 million.
Let us look at the implementation of the Bribery Act 2010—legislation that we all think is working quite well—with a “failure to prevent” duty in it. In the UK, we have seen 99 criminal convictions since its introduction. In America, where there is a similar legislative framework, 236 criminal convictions—more than twice as many—have been completed.
Despite our timid approach to pursuing economic crime, and despite our pathetic response, it still pays to pursue it. In the five years between 2016 and 2021, the enforcement agencies brought in £3.9 billion to Treasury coffers. So it is not just a good thing for all those other arguments we have given; it also helps to support the public finances.
It is pointless passing laws and then failing to agree appropriate funding that would enable the Government to put those laws into practice. Our amendments aim to do just that, at—I stress this fact, which I think the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) mentioned—no cost to the taxpayer. We are doing it through raising the fees, which do not appear on the public sector borrowing requirement. We are not doing it by demanding any bit of public sector funding towards that cost.
It is absurdly low, whatever Members feel, to pay £12 to set up a company. To put that into context—this is a figure I used in Committee, but I will share it with the House—it costs £1,220 to get a visa for a skilled farm worker. We have just got the priorities completely, crazily wrong. If we look at the cost of incorporating a company across the world, even in those jurisdictions that are not the best, the British Virgin Islands charges £1,000 to set up a company and Jersey charges £425 to set up a company. In America, it varies from $570 to $1,400. Luxembourg—not my favourite jurisdiction—charges €1,100. It is only Greece and Slovenia who charge less than the UK.
We propose £100. That is a figure slightly imagined rather than grounded in fact, but it is the figure the Treasury Committee chose and the figure that the House of Lords’ Committee on fraud put forward, so we thought it was a better one. I do not accept that it is a barrier to any business, whether it is run by women or men. I just do not accept that argument at all. If you are setting up a business and you do not have £100, you have to question, whatever the nature of the business, the motivations for establishing it.