My Lords, I will speak only to this amendment. We will have the debate on whether employees should give up rights for shares when we deal with the next amendment. I restrict myself purely to the tax issue here. It is a serious point, because I have hit this when I have been offered share options. Because you receive the benefit, theoretically, you are meant to pay income tax on it in that year. You do not really have any money to pay it with because you have not yet been paid. If you are rich, you can use these benefits and invest in start-up companies using the SEIS: the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme. However, you must have some other income against which to offset it, so taking this up is of no interest to the average employee. They have no other outside income. They will have nothing to pay the tax with because of the cash flow: they are being forced to pay a tax when they have not yet received the money. It is therefore complete lunacy, for the logic of this clause, not to accept the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Flight. It makes this clause work.
Whether it should exist is a separate issue that we are about to discuss in the debate on Amendment 50. I accept that entirely. However, if the clause is to stay in the Bill, the amendment improves it greatly. The clause will then achieve its purpose of trying to get employees involved in the running of the company and the drive to make that company succeed. However, if they cannot afford to take up the shares because of the tax regime, and there is an anomaly in it and it will just fail anyway—in which case, Amendment 50 will be redundant, because no one will bother with the scheme.