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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I sought to confine myself at the moment to Amendment No. 308, which asks for a committee to be set up and to produce a remuneration report. That is the only amendment I have addressed so far. However, I have suggested that the purpose of a remuneration committee is not only to produce a report, but also to do all the other things I mentioned regarding pay, and then to produce a report. I therefore suggest that the amendment does not really achieve what the noble Lord is trying to achieve. I am sure that the noble Lord would not expect me to agree with him that employee workplace representatives on a remuneration committee would be a helpful suggestion. The work of a remuneration committee turns on making difficult and sensitive judgments about a very small number of individuals—the board of directors and usually the swathe of senior management just below it—and the right levels of reward for them. Transparency has been initiated with the introduction of remuneration reporting requirements, and companies are now being encouraged to go further by other organisations. Personally, I do not believe that having workplace representatives on such committees would in any sense make their work better; it certainly would not make the work any easier. However, I wanted to make the point that we do agree about transparency, although I do not think that the amendments put forward by the noble Lord would help to achieve that.