Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I am completely appalled by the Minister’s response. He has not given a substantive reason for the DTI collecting all this paperwork. There will be a statutory information flow. A person, or possibly even a whole section, in the DTI will be set up to receive, file, consider, monitor and summarise pieces of paper on which they will take no action, because that is what the FRRP is there for. I hope that the Minister will take this matter away with his Treasury hat on and discuss it with his DTI colleagues. This looks like unnecessary paper and, as we know, when paper flows to bureaucracies such as the DTI, they set up systems to handle them; they do not just put them in the bin—civil servants are not trained to behave in that way. We need to root out this kind of duplicate activity, and so I hope very much that the Minister will, of his own volition, come back with an amendment on Report which says that unnecessary bureaucracy must be stopped. If he does not, I may do so. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Clause 510 agreed to.