Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Lord Agnew of Oulton and Lord Browne of Ladyton

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Leigh of Hurley, together with the notice given by the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, that he intends to oppose the Question that Clause 54 stand part of the Bill; I suspect that in his absence this will not be part of the process but I will cover the issues that are raised.

I will confine myself to a few observations. First, no one wishes to stifle micro-enterprises with too onerous a set of reporting duties but, in a Bill that has the word “transparency” in its very name, it is surely important that micro-entities are not exempted from such a reporting duty. That small businesses are not merely the flywheel but the very motor of the UK economy is well known and constantly rehearsed. I have no need to go through all that but flourishing surely cannot come at the price of opacity when that opacity will be exploited in the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, suggests it has been in the past and we know is a problem.

The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, do not merely serve as a symbolic recognition of this fact but serve a useful practical purpose, which I will turn to. It is the stated aim of the Government for Companies House to be a fully digital organisation by 2025. The amendments under discussion ensure that electronic documents submitted to the registrar not only conform with its standard electronic format but ensure that they meet standards of accuracy, completeness and consistency. Surely, each of these measures is desirable and, taken together, they are more desirable still.

If the Government are not minded to accept the noble Lord’s amendments, it would be useful to know which of these requirements they regard as superfluous. It would also be helpful to know how the Government feel that these amendments fail to assist Companies House in meeting its own target of becoming fully digital in the next two years, which seems a very challenging target.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I just want to come in on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, on micro-accounts. It was actually 11,000 companies that were registered to this poor man’s residential address in Wales. It all relates to a new loophole, which has been discovered by foreign traders selling on the internet. Up until Brexit, they were essentially avoiding VAT because there was no real mechanism for HMRC to recover it all around the world but, when we left the European Union, we brought in our own regulations. There is a loophole that if, as in this case, you are a Chinese trader and you register a company in the UK, you do not have to pay VAT through the platform on which you are selling the goods.

HRMC is completely floored by this. In its letter to Meg Hillier, it said simply that it had not recognised any fraud so far. Let us get real. Part of the problem is that it is not getting the data. If it could scrape all the data off those 11,000 company accounts, it would very quickly see the pattern.

Net-zero Emissions Target

Debate between Lord Agnew of Oulton and Lord Browne of Ladyton

Monday 11th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure the Minister will agree that the Government need to take a joined-up approach to decarbonising the economy. Surely it is inefficient and wasteful to public funds to stimulate decarbonisation with some funds, while stimulating the creation of greenhouse gas emissions with others. When will we see subsidies for fossil fuels wound down?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, as I mentioned in an earlier answer, we need to do this transition in an orderly way. We need to ensure that our net-zero energy generation is sustainable. We are moving very quickly. We have seen, for example, the cost of offshore wind drop dramatically over the last five years, from over £100 per kilowatt hour to around £45, but we need to keep moving that along before we remove any more support to the traditional sources of energy.

Economy

Debate between Lord Agnew of Oulton and Lord Browne of Ladyton

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord that there needs to be integration. The overriding priority is to crank up the economy again; that is why we have created a group in Downing Street called Project Speed, which is designed to take hold of any opportunity that is being blocked in any way, to shake it and make it happen quicker. I remain optimistic, as I said in response to an earlier question, that we will resolve our difficulties with the European Union and will have some form of workable deal by the end of the year.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, in the other place, the Chancellor was asked four times about help for the 3 million working UK taxpayers who, until now, have had no access to any of the Government’s Covid-19 support packages. Four times he ducked the question. So, in the words of my honourable friend Gerald Jones, I now offer the Minister the opportunity to correct that repeated omission. What assurances can he offer that the measures announced in this Statement, and any ongoing policy, will not continue to exclude them?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, while there might not be individual schemes available for the group of people that the noble Lord talks about, we have made wider funding available through the uprating of universal credit and additional grants to local authorities. I am very aware that there are people in difficulty but we believe that the wider social security safety net is there to support them.