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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

My Lords, before the noble Viscount sits down, he has touched on one of the points that would apply with certain relationships between beneficial owners and the companies providing nominee shareholdings for those beneficial owners. But he does not deal with the thousands, if not millions, of small shareholders who purchase particularly ISAs through institutions. If you buy an ISA through Barclays bank, you do not have the luxury of saying ““I tell you what: I want to have nominee company X who will provide me with the annual report””. Those small shareholders are locked into the nominee company that the provider of the ISA is leading them to. They have no option. When you decide whether you will put your £6,000 into an ISA on 5 April, you do not think to yourself, Lord Bledisloe made the point. I have got to make sure that that company will provide me with the annual report and give me my voting rights””. Of course not. So those myriads of small shareholders are locked into the structure that the financial institutions have given them. Of course, the point is right that if you have 2 million shares in GlaxoSmithKline, you can probably persuade your stockbroker’s nominee company to give you the annual report. But we are talking about the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of small shareholders who are into small shareholding deals, usually through ISAs, which require them to accept the nominee company and the rules that that institution gives them.