I am extremely grateful to my noble friend and I congratulate his officials on drafting a speaking note of brilliant obfuscation, which manages to avoid most of the issues. The one point that he did make, which was about the public benefit, obviously occurs only in charities’ accounts; it does not occur in an ordinary company’s accounts. That is the one difference, and that surely can be accommodated in a common form and does not represent an insuperable difficulty.
The second red herring concerned the charitable incorporated organisation—the CIO—which has now been in existence for just over 12 months. There is, of course, a problem for companies. At present the Charity Commission will not accept conversion because of the volume of work; it simply cannot take on more than a certain number of CIO applications at a time. Indeed, there is no reason why we should force people who have set up charitable companies to become CIOs. It is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope to say that they have to change their arrangements when, quite simply, a regulatory action by my noble friend would solve the problem.
Finally, my noble friend said that he was going to invite the two regulators to write to me setting out how they would take this forward. However, it is now 18 months since the Government accepted the recommendation that I made a year before that. Do we not yet have a plan from Companies House, after 18 months? Surely, we could find a way of acting with a little more urgency. I urge my noble friend to act as the Dyno-Rod man on this matter to ensure that we move the whole issue forward; otherwise, in two or three years’ time, we will still be discussing how difficult it is, and we will be talking about all the problems that he has been informed about by his officials.
I would like my noble friend to take a personal interest rather than merely ask the organisations to write to me, which means that the issue will
certainly be put in the long grass. However, I am grateful for his reply and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.