Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have every sympathy with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. What concerns me, and the events of the past few days rather demonstrate this, is that the amendment does not go far enough in relation to the problem that we appear to be faced with. When we were in the Moses Room, nobody would have dreamt that an issue would come forward under which animal rights activists appear to want to get hold of the shareholder register of GSK to use it to frighten people into selling their shares because of the use by GSK of the services of Huntingdon Life Sciences. Indeed, one cannot even contemplate what will happen when the publicity about this leads to farmers getting hold of the shareholder list for Sainsbury’s and demonstrating to persuade everyone to sell their Sainsbury’s shares because Sainsbury’s is not dealing properly with the interests of farmers. My concern about the amendment is that history has moved on. Between now and Third Reading, or between Third Reading and the Bill going to another place, the Government really must think about what they will do about this because, as I started by saying, no one thought that animal rights activists would start to attack shareholders in these sorts of companies. The Government need to take a policy decision. One of the problems of discussing this on Report shortly before Third Reading is that the issue needs to be thought through. It did not arise in Committee, and I hope that the Minister will take that on board and say that he will return with proposals either here or in another place to deal with what is clearly a very serious issue.