Clause 13
Company Law Reform Bill [Lords]
11:15 am
Margaret Hodge (Minister of State (Industry and the Regions), Department of Trade and Industry; Barking, Labour)
Clearly, prevention is the better route, and we all want to go down it. As has been said, we hope that the existence of the penalties will become a disincentive to breaking the rules. I am simply not convinced that we shall be better able to prevent fraud if we have a witnessed statutory declaration. That was all I was saying, although I entirely accept that we would rather prevent fraud, and we need constantly to look at the development of electronic communication to see how we can improve facilities for doing so. The issue regularly comes across my desk in relation to other parts of my portfolio.