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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

If only. If the company can see only dimly what the nature of its future business relationship with its suppliers will be, it will be rather hard for the directors to take it into account. They must do so only so far as is reasonably practicable. But having said that, and after the sort of example that the noble Lord gave, I should have thought that the directors would say, ““We aim to be this sort of company and the consequence of that is that we are likely to have this sort of relationship with a number of suppliers. We can’t identify specifically what they are, so when we are making our decisions, it is something to which we need to have regard.”” It is not and cannot be an absolute duty, and the noble Lord is right to point out one of the circumstances in which it cannot be—but that is not a reason for not including it as part of the enlightened shareholder value approach. I hope that I have answered all the questions that were put to me and explained to the satisfaction of noble Lords why we have chosen this way in which to define the starting point for the duty.