Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

My Lords, I want to reinforce some of what my noble friend the Minister has just said with regard to these definitions and whether they should include any financial criteria as well as the headcount. It is very important that they do, and I was disappointed to see that this amendment left out the financial provisions. If the Committee looked through the list of businesses that we were looking at the other day, while considering the amendment of my noble friend Lord Flight, your Lordships would see that some very large businesses with huge turnovers—or, for that matter, huge balance sheet totals—nevertheless have very few people working for them. They have very few employees and are not small businesses by any normal criteria. It is important to include financial criteria within these definitions.