Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)

My Lords, as ever with many big government ideas, there is a solution that is yet to find a problem. I am yet to hear a ministerial Statement on the very serious data events that happened at Companies House over the last week. I have not heard a Statement from Ministers at the other end, and I do not believe I have heard one in this House. What happened last week was probably the most serious data breach to hit Companies House in a generation. I am in practice as a chartered accountant, and let me advise the House and the Minister on what happened. If one were logged in to Companies House with one’s personal online registration, one could then find a backdoor route very simply to access any company record in the UK, change directors’ details, find their personal address, file company accounts and file new confirmation statements. This is serious stuff and it is why, me included, we have serious concerns about big government attempts at managing data, because it generally goes wrong. Where a poste restante email address is used, which is very commonplace within practices, those practices are going to have to trawl through all the companies registered with them. Many in the profession are asking: will the Government reimburse the practices which will have to spend many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours making sure that the Companies House foul-up has not affected their clients?