Lord Sharkey (LD)

My Lords, we will support both of these instruments, and I will be brief. The first instrument is a straightforward and necessary increase in the disclosure powers of Companies House and, as the Minister has made clear, the SI extends disclosure powers to cover non-public organisations and specifies to whom information may be disclosed and under what circumstances. All this seems clear and with obvious benefits, although I confess that I am not at all clear what a “judicial factor”, mentioned in Regulation 3(g), is or does. Perhaps the Minister could enlighten us. We are generally happy with measures that improve the utility or performance of Companies House. Appropriately increased and targeted disclosure powers are definitely a good thing, but arguably more important is the ID-checking regime at Companies House. In that context, it was good to see Companies House quoted in last Wednesday’s Times, saying: “We take fraud seriously and all allegations are fully investigated. We are preparing to introduce compulsory identity verification checks. This will provide greater assurance about who is setting up, running, owning, and controlling companies”. That is welcome news, if a little overdue. Can the Minister say when Parliament will see these new and obviously vital proposals? The second SI essentially, as the Minister said, deals with the disclosure of residential addresses on the public companies register. It proposes new circumstances in which these addresses may be protected from exposure via Companies House registration details. Here, I declare a kind of interest: I have, for the past nine years, benefited from a Companies House exemption, under the existing regime, from disclosure of my residential address. The circumstances surrounding my exemption were clear and compelling enough to qualify for non-disclosure, but they would not serve to protect from exposure any address currently or formerly used as a company’s registered office. This instrument will allow an application to protect a residential address when it was previously the registered address for the company, and this will apply, mutatis mutandis, to LLPs. There are appropriate protections against using this new power to frustrate challenges to the dissolution of a company, as the Minister mentioned. This all seems very sensible, and the EM notes in paragraph 5.8: “Companies House has for a long time been inundated with requests for this kind of protection, as the previous law prevented many people from protecting publicly available address information that put them at risk, for example in cases of domestic abuse”. In paragraph 6.5, the EM says: “Further regulations will be made in due course to introduce additional measures preventing the abuse of personal information on the companies register”. I encourage the Minister to make rapid progress on these new proposals. Companies House needs all the help it can get.