Company Directors: Identification

Lord Vaux of Harrowden Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

The Minister will remember that during the passage of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act last year, we had a lot of debates on how to tackle the problem of nominees being used to hide shareholders’ real identities. During ping-pong on the Bill, he rightly referred to

“what we perceive to be an industry of nominee service providers prone to acting unlawfully”.—[Official Report, 11/9/23; col. 685.]

As a result, the Government introduced a power to make regulations that would impose obligations on nominees to enable companies to find out who their persons of significant control are. Can the Minister please tell us whether HM Government still intend to make such regulations? If so, when? If not, why not?

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question and his extremely collaborative input in the ECCT Bill over the past year or so. The statutory instrument that we are introducing today looks at the identity verification checks that ACSPs will have to undertake. As he will know, ACSPs are well covered by their various industry bodies, and, as I said, we have done an enormous amount to ensure that information on the register in Companies House is now true and verifiable. He will also know that we have gone even further to ensure that people with significant control are caught by the new regulations.