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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I rise to support the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Freeman. I have always believed that in order to manage something well, one needs to measure it. A tradition of good management is to measure the success of businesses in a clear and defined way that can be audited. I have become very confused about how one measures enlightened benefits. We all have enlightened benefits, and most people run businesses with enlightened benefits in mind, but measuring them so that some outside force is able to say whether a business has achieved them is matter of opinion. It is a very dangerous route to go down. The other point that I would make is this. The business community of this country creates all the wealth. All the money that we—the Government and all of us—spend is at some time made by business. Anything that we do to undermine that wealth-creating aspect of our business community is a serious matter for the country as a whole. It worries me that pushing businesses to do things which were not automatically right for them in order to create wealth and make a success of business would ultimately undermine the wealth of the nation—and that would be very dangerous. If the Government feel that the whole nation and all businesses must take note of certain issues, then, by all means, they should be the subject of legislation, as we are now seeing in the development of carbon-free societies. Dealing with that sort of issue is a matter for government rather than for individual businesses. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, gave the examples of BP and Shell, which are very large companies. But the majority of our wealth is created by small companies, where survival becomes a much more important priority than considering some of these wider issues. I hope that the Government will take account of these points when they decide how to deal with these matters.