It is an important clause—I agree with the Minister on that—but equally, if we introduce a duty to ensure that persons with significant control of companies are who they say they are, it will strengthen the Bill. It will not undermine or contradict any of its clauses; it will simply strengthen it. With all my experience in this House as both a Minister and a Back Bencher, I know that if we are not very specific about what we place in legislation, we come back to it in subsequent years and regret that lack of determination. We see that particularly in our attempts to fight economic crime; so many times we think we have achieved something, then we come back and find it has not worked.
I turn to the first set of amendments that we in the all-party parliamentary group think are necessary, many of which have been tabled by the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness. We have tabled several amendments to create new duties on Companies House, rather than giving it powers, the most critical of which is about corporate service providers. If the Minister does not accept that, I predict that we will end up creating another database that is infected with falsehoods and errors, and will simply reinforce in people’s minds across the globe the growing acceptance that the UK is the best place to hide and launder dirty money.
4.45 pm
The Government propose that the verification of data of our companies should not be carried out by Companies House staff, but should be outsourced to company service providers and other professionals. I do not entirely agree, but I accept that it is the Government’s right to determine that. If those professionals are to be responsible for the utterly crucial tests of verifying the identity of a company’s beneficial owner and the legitimacy of the address—all that important stuff—we must have confidence and trust in their honesty and integrity. We must ensure that they are properly supervised and checked and that, where necessary, they are disciplined by their professional organisation and stopped from acting in a professional capacity.
Let us take an honest look at where we are today. About half the companies registered at Companies House are established through trust and company service providers, but the “National risk assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing 2020” says that trust and company service providers present the “highest risk” to the effectiveness of AML regulations. There are too many bad apples among that group of professionals—it is not just a few.
I will talk about the Danske Bank scandal, in which the Minister has consistently expressed great interest and concern. Corrupt trust and company service providers played a key role in enabling massive sums—I have seen figures from £200 billion to £236 billion—to be laundered out of places such as Russia and Azerbaijan into jurisdictions such as the UK, the USA and others.