Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

If you are going to impose extra duties and obligations for auditors to comply with, it seems to me that you potentially need sanctions to deal with non-compliance. So there has to be some sanction. I do not think there is a disagreement in practice as to what we think should happen—and probably routinely will happen—but, in our view, it is going a step too far to put it into the Bill. The answering of questions is a genuine issue. I might have been a little flippant earlier, but if you have to make a judgment as to whether an auditor has answered the questions posed, it would open a whole minefield if that was a requirement in statute, with penalties if it was not complied with. It is a practical matter. We want to achieve a sensible outcome but doing so in the way proposed would be overly prescriptive. As the noble Baroness knows, we are a deregulating government.