My Lords, I declare an interest in that for many years I was chairman of the Industrial Co-partnership Association. I also happen to be fortunate enough to have floated a company on the stock exchange when we had 1,000 employees, and we gave 10% of the company to our employees.
I am deeply committed to the concept of wider share ownership but I am concerned about Clause 27. I shall give the Committee an example of quite what ownership means to some people. One of the older women in our company came up to me about a month after we had floated it and said, “Guvnor, you just don’t know what it means to me to feel I am part of this company. It has made my life”. That just brought tears to my eyes. People want to belong, and in smaller businesses they can belong and feel that they are names, not numbers.
However, the whole point of wider industrial shareholding is to try to create a sense of common purpose. I fear that the unnecessary obstacles and quid pro quos put into Clause 27 go in exactly the opposite direction; they negate trust rather than increase it. With great reluctance, therefore, I have to speak against the Government, who I am sure are right to encourage wider share ownership. If you wrap it up in complexity, cover it in advisers and make it all too difficult, it simply will not happen, but it is fundamentally the most attractive and important thing to create a wider capital-owning society in which everyone feels they have a stake.
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