Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful for that intervention because I support the amendment in its totality. When we go back to the remarks made by the noble Lord on the Benches opposite about the welcome or otherwise of the OFR, one of the key issues of concern was the degree of care and the degree of liability attaching to it. If you want anything other than boilerplate reporting—it has been stated on numerous occasions in the debates on the Bill that what we are looking for is a development of narrative reporting; I stress the word ““development””—we are not going to get to a fixed point in time with it. The process will develop over time. If you want that to take place and to address the issues that my noble friend Lady Northover and the right reverend Prelates opposite have been talking about, there must be some degree of protection. Otherwise all you will get—I would have thought that the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, with his background as a practising lawyer, would have understood this—you will get volumes of things known as completion notes or proof of notes. With those you can go back and relate every single comment in the report to something that can be substantiated in detail and with an audit trail. If that is what we want, fine; we will get it. But I do not believe that is where we want to go. I believe that we want to get to better narrative reporting and to see that process develop. To do that, it is absolutely essential to provide what I call a safe haven and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, calls a safe harbour, but we shall leave that to one side. Again, I support the amendment and I note that it is probing in nature. We look forward to hearing what the Government have to say and what they may bring forward at Third Reading.