Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

My Lords, like my noble friend, I am relieved that I have not been involved in these proceedings. I picked up the Bill thinking it was quite big, only to find to my astonishment that it was Volume I. I will pick up one important point. Companies, particularly those like Glaxo, are now highly mobile. The decision whether to locate their headquarters here in Britain or elsewhere is a finely balanced one. There are already tax and other pressures encouraging them to go elsewhere. If we land boards of directors with onerous provisions, that will be yet another incentive to go elsewhere. I support my noble friend’s amendment because it goes some way to improving the Bill, but, like my noble friend Lord Jenkin, I am not sure that it entirely meets the problem because it rests on the foundation of the Bill, with the difficulty of defining an ““improper purpose””. I ask the Minister, who clearly wants to address this problem, whether that is not the wrong way round. Should not the legislation start from the assumption that there ought to be a proper purpose before the names are revealed? I sometimes think that we have gone so far down the disclosure road in this country that we not only invade people’s privacy but are now damaging their security. Shareholder information need not necessarily be disclosed directly. For example, the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, mentioned the legitimate rights of small shareholders to circulate information. That could be done by the company without disclosing information about shareholders. It is difficult to know how any shareholder or other person might have a proper purpose: they might apply with a legitimate purpose, but the information is then made available to other parties. As we have seen, some of these terrorist groups, particularly in animal welfare, are completely without scruple.