Bank Industry Insights: March 2024 edition

There has been a great deal of talk about the amount of "fiscal headroom" available to Jeremy Hunt in deciding priorities for this last pre-election Budget. And whether tax cuts or increased public spending would be more appealing to the electorate. In the end, there were no surprises. Headlines include:

• The VAT registration threshold has finally been increased albeit only from ￡85k to ￡90k, with effect from 1 April. This is despite Jeremy Hunt announcing at the Autumn Statement 2022 that the VAT registration would not change for a period of two years from 1 April 2024, in order to give businesses certainty…
• The Spring Finance Bill will contain provisions in relation to a new Reserved Investor Fund, intended to fill a gap in the current UK funds range for an onshore lower-cost alternative to existing fund structures.
• Once again there were few 'green' tax measures announced in the Budget, other than confirmation that a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will be introduced, taking the form of a levy on carbon-intensive imports from countries with lower or non-existent carbon costs to prevent 'carbon leakage'. You can find more detail on the CBAM in the Ashurst briefing here .

The long-awaited Companies House reforms have also come into force this week. Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, there will be changes to a company formation as there will be a requirement for a company to maintain an email address that Companies House can use to communicate with it. Companies will also have to have an appropriate registered office, and are no longer allowed to use a PO box. Rachel Sexton, Head of Ashurst Risk Advisory UK and Ruby Hamid, Partner at Ashurst, gave their thoughts to City A.M. on this important development: “We have seen an increase in Companies House’s appetite to use its prosecutorial powers – we have a number of these cases at the moment – and that trend looks set to continue.” Indeed Companies House are have launched an “urgent review” of its processes after identifying erroneous satisfaction of charge filings late last month. As reported by the FT this week , Companies House said on Monday that: “We have taken steps to block the account that is linked with these transactions and, using new powers available to us, will remove the related filings".

Have you been tuning into our Corporate Crime and Investigations Series ? The final episode is now available, on podcast or transcript . In this last instalment of the mini-series, our international panel of experts dissect the most significant enforcement threats that have shaped the global corporate landscape over the past 12 months, and what enforcement risks corporates must look out for in 2024 – including whether the FCA's and PRA's increasing focus on non-financial misconduct in financial institutions, such as bullying, harassment, and sexual misconduct, will filter into the broader corporate world.

Two other events that you can also catch up on:

On 1 February, we hosted our annual data protection round-up event at our London office, to review the key data protection and privacy developments from the UK and EU in the past 12 months as well as our predictions for the year ahead. We have summarised a selection of sound bites from Ashurst's multi-disciplinary data team who spoke at the event, including the new AI Act passed by the EU, and?the new cyber governance code which the UK Government launched a "call for views" on last month. To hear more from our Data Privacy and Cyber Security team, don't forget to sign-up to the Data Bytes newsletter, which sets out the key privacy legal and policy developments month-to-month.

On 8 February, UK Finance and Ashurst Risk Advisory co-hosted a symposium with Amazon Web Service, to discuss changes towards better organisational and market resilience . The Bank of England was part of a panel discussion and provided some context on evolution of the operational resilience policy, including insights on industry feedback, international engagements and how this helps shape the authorities approach to policy creation. We hope these sessions are the first step of an ongoing transparent dialogue and collaboration to overcome collective challenges.