Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I listened very carefully to the Minister, but I should like to take us a stage further on this. I have Amendment No. A23 in the group, to which the Minister referred in his concluding remarks. I was not quite clear, apart from the suggestion that the clause would create uncertainty, why the Government felt that it needed to go. I understand exactly what the Minister was saying—that we are going back to Section 81 for the 1985 Act, because, as he said, the present situation created uncertainty. Our feeling was that the financial world is moving on fast, so wider definitions of securities were not inappropriate given how derivatives and other instruments had developed in the period since 1985 and will, presumably, develop in other ways. We felt that Clause 527 could usefully stay and tabled Amendment No. A23 to make it clear that the provision in line 31 and subsection (6) needed expanding in that way. I will read carefully what the Minister has said. I did not actually hear a very persuasive case for why this provision should be withdrawn, and why we should go back to an Act that is 20 years out of date and reflects a very different financial structure and environment from that which is available now.