Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 287:"Page 216, line 27, leave out ““meets the following conditions”” and insert ““qualifies as a small company pursuant to section 360””" The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 288, 291, 292 and 294. These concern Clauses 459 and 464. I am extremely grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Sharman and Lord Razzall, for attaching their names to this group. We now come to the second part of my concern about independent charity examiners: the thresholds at which charities will be able to take advantage of these specialist procedures. As I have said before, at present charitable companies with an income of between £90,000 and £250,000 per annum are required to have a report drawn up by a reporting accountant. However, this regime was not designed specifically with charities in mind and lasted for only a short time in relation to small companies in general. Therefore its continued application in the Bill to charitable companies is quite anomalous. I note that the Government have tabled Amendments Nos. 290 and 293 in this group, which appear to travel in the same direction. Perhaps I may outline briefly our approach on these. Instead of tying this Bill hard and fast to definite figures, as the Government appear to wish to do, we have cross-referred to the appropriate places in charities statute—following the stricture of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, that charity issues should be decided in a charity forum. For example, where the Government have chosen to insert ““£500,000”” in Clause 464, we refer instead to,"““section 43(1) of the Charities Act 1993””," which is where this figure originates from. Our hope is that by doing this we avoid the inflexibility of having a figure in primary company legislation, which, as noble Lords opposite are inclined to argue, is extremely difficult to keep up to date. Indeed, trying to keep this up to date in two pieces of primary legislation will be even more difficult. I expect per contra that on this occasion the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, will argue that it is better to err on the side of clarity in the Bill. However, given the 20-year gap between this Bill and its main predecessor, the Companies Act 1985, we remain to be convinced that this really is the best approach. I do not think that we are far from an accord on this point, but I hope that the Government will be able to give us some additional assurance. I beg to move.