Unit Trusts (Electronic Communications) Order 2009

I am grateful to the Minister for introducing these two welcome statutory instruments. Indeed, they would have been welcome a year ago. Anyway, he has put forward in his usual fine fashion a number of extremely good reasons for them. It is rather ironic that two instruments allowing for the more efficient and accurate transfer of information should have been held up by inefficiencies and inaccuracies within the Treasury, but such is government. The statutory instruments are welcome for various reasons which the Minister has already emphasised. The most obvious is that they give the industry the opportunity to make significant savings for a relatively low start-up cost. It is also a good thing that the power is permissive rather than prescriptive. There have been enough fiascos recently around government-contracted IT systems for there to be strong reasons to allow the private sector to go at its own speed. Prescription would not be necessary to achieve a large take-up, as the regulations are both welcome and long awaited by the industry, and are in line with arrangements for other types of financial instruments. There have been some concerns about the security of the new arrangements, and I am glad to see from the debates in another place on the regulations that liability remains with the fund manager for losses incurred on fraudulent transactions, as it does with paper transactions. On the whole, the statutory instruments are welcome.