---

Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I accept the argument. All these measures have their imperfections, and volatility is clearly one of the imperfections in what we have proposed here. But if people have to work out what the paid-up capital, that is an anachronistic way of carrying out the measurement, as the Minister said. If you had a paid-up par value of 1p in your job lot of penny shares, your £100 would have to comprise 10,000 shares and it could be extremely expensive for members to try to fit that in. I accept the argument about volatility, but I do not accept the other barrel of the argument: that this is going to restrict the ability of members to exercise their rights under this clause. Under certain circumstances, £100-worth of par value paid-up capital could be a great deal more difficult to achieve than £1,000-worth of market value. I hope the Minister will have another look at that. I am not trying to argue that we have got the perfect answer, because I accept the volatility issue. But the par value is a very old-fashioned and difficult way of assessing what is needed to reach this threshold. Perhaps we can come back to this. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.