In this podcast Meg speaks with Martin Swain, Director of Strategy Policy and Communications. They discuss how we combat economic crime through active use of analysis and intelligence and how we plan to develop this in the future. This is the fifth podcast in a six part series, each one discussing our strategic goals.   MH: Hello and welcome to another podcast episode from Companies House. We have recently launched our new five-year strategy and one of our strategic goals is all about how we ‘combat economic crime through active use of analysis and intelligence’. So, I'm here today with Martin Swain, who is the Director of Strategy, Policy, and Communications, at Companies House. And today Martin's going to give us a bit of an insight into his work and how that work runs through who we are and what we do.     Hi Martin, how are you?     MS: I am alright, how you doing?     MH: Yeah, not bad. Thank you. So, I'm just going to start off my first question which is, can you tell me a little bit about your role and how it contributes to us as an organisation.     MS: Yeah, no problem. So, I mean you just stabbed my job title, which is kind of set it on the tin. So, I'm a Director for Strategy, Policy and Communications. That's my main roles and obviously, you know involved in developing the new five-year strategy that we launched recently and involved with lots of policy development work and communications work. But, I guess around economic crime, I have a role to lead for the board around some of the economic crime policy and our enforcement and intelligence policy, working with our service owner Stuart Morgan in that area to kind of frame how we are taking forward our approach now with the current powers that we have but also starting to shape what our future strategy for intelligence and enforcement will be when we get the new powers that we hope will get parliamentary time for, will get very soon.    MH: Cool. So, how does Companies House at the moment work with law enforcement?     MS: Yeah. That's where so we've got a great relationship with a lot of law enforcement agencies. And you know, we already do a great amount of work but I suppose it's really important upfront to say that, you know, the vast majority of companies are law-abiding and they follow the rules of the Companies Act and they comply with their requirements. So, I think it's really important to say that it is a minority of companies that are used for economic crime or illicit activities or illegal activities. So, that's really important to say upfront. But you know, we already do an awful lot to support law enforcement. We provide data where we are able to support investigations. We look at trends on the register and try to establish where we can see whether there's potentially suspicious activity. We will always follow up where there are reports of fraudulent activity and take whatever action we can. And as I say, you know, really developing more and more all the time those relationships with those key law enforcement agencies like the National Crime Agency, local police, regional police, but also working with things like the National Economic Crime Centre.    MH: Right. Well that's quite a breadth of different places and well I think it’s like quite interesting about this goal. There are obviously a few different ones but this one is sort of the newest.     MS: Yeah, and I'd say Meg this is probably for me and I shouldn't say that but it's probably the most exciting goal because this is really taking Companies House into new territory. We are moving away from being just a register to being much more of an assertive partner in law enforcement, you know and colleagues have done some really great work over the last few years within Companies House to really start us on that journey. But, I think putting this as a goal of our strategy front-and-centre that we really want to play the biggest part we can in tapping economic crime and fraudulent activi