My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I will refer to that a little later in my contribution.
There is another report on HMRC’s supervision of company service providers. It looked at 672 of the company service providers and only 95—14%—were found to be compliant with checking that AML regulations were enforced by their members. More than half—352—were non-compliant, but only a third of those 352 were ever deemed to be non-compliant and were pursued through the courts; they received an average fine of £8,000.
This litany of ills demonstrates why we need to sort out the supervision of company service providers before we enact the legislation, and that is why our amendments in the name of the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness are so important. We need to be certain that the company service providers have been properly checked and supervised before we let them loose on verifying data for the new register.
The Treasury is already reviewing the supervision mechanism. I saw just recently that consultation on that review will start in the second quarter of 2023. What I am saying to the Minister is: where there is a political will, there is a political way. There is absolutely no reason why the review should not be completed and implemented concurrently with implementation of the legislation contained in the Bill. By putting that in the Bill, we would make certain—with my greatest love for every civil servant in the country—that that gets enacted. If we do not do that, we will end up with another dud register. We are giving him and the Government a pragmatic and practical suggestion that will simply make the Bill work as it is intended.
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