Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 36:"Page 39, line 19, leave out paragraph (c)." The noble Lord said: My Lords, our amendment seeks to remove a piece of legislation that has become superfluous and unnecessary—the requirement that a company wishing to re-register as a public company must have a written statement from its auditor that the balance sheet amount at that date is not less than the aggregate of its called-up share capital and undistributable reserves. In the past, this has been intended to act as a bar to many companies re-registering, but we are told that in practice it is routinely circumvented by other methods which involve extra time and expense for the same result. There seems to be little point in clinging on to this requirement, which is lifted directly from the Companies Act 1985, if it performs no useful regulatory purpose. The Minister may say that it is desirable for companies to be prevented from re-registering if they cannot fulfil this requirement—as the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, stated in Grand Committee—but that misses our point. If the Government are keen on keeping this requirement, they should look to ways of bolstering this provision to make it truly effective. The current position, which is restated in the Bill, does not have the desired effect; it is without impact and, therefore, in a deregulatory spirit, should be removed. I beg to move.