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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I inquire of those who support the amendments whether they have given any consideration to the costs that would be associated with extending the business review in this way—in particular, extending the audit and business review requirements to medium-sized companies. The total regulatory impact assessment for the combined OFR and business review is £130 million, of which apparently £30-odd million would be saved by removing the OFR. That is largely to do with removing the audit requirement on the OFR. I must say that those figures were disputed by anyone at the larger end of the corporate sector, but let us take them as they are. If those are the figures for the combined OFR/business review and we are now talking about extending the audit requirement across a huge swathe of British companies—all those companies that are not small companies—we must add on at least £30 million and quite a lot more, because of the larger number of companies that would come back into its scope. Those medium-sized companies would also have to incur the cost of producing that information in those accounts. We need to understand what those costs would be to see whether the amendments are proportionate to their benefit. I shall make no comment on whether I think that that is proportionate, but we would require the information to make some kind of judgment.