Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

In this group, I have Amendment No. A208ZA, which addresses the same point as that just made by the noble Lord, Lord Sharman, but in a slightly different way. Given the potential importance of the definition of ““authenticated””, particularly in the context of electronic communications, it would be worthwhile to give further thought to how companies should go about verifying the identity of the sender of documents by electronic means. Some large companies may set up unique identifiers for shareholders or invest in encryption technology, but we wonder about the vast majority of smaller companies and as the noble Lord, Lord Sharman, said, we wonder what normal commercial practice will be. We wonder whether this is an area where the Secretary of State could usefully provide some guidance on what is expected from companies. This will be a rapidly evolving area over the years ahead, and anything that we say today will almost certainly be out of date by the time the Bill comes into force, let alone by the time it comes to the end of its life. Trying to be too prescriptive here is probably a mistake, but the Government could play a useful role in encouraging best practice to evolve by providing guidance on normal commercial practice, and that is what we seek to insert as a new subsection.