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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

My Lords, my name appears on Amendment No. 349, with that of the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, but I also support her other amendments in this group. In Grand Committee the Minister explained that the Government positively wanted auditors of quoted companies to make a statement of circumstances connected with their leaving office. Amendment No. 349, to which I have added my name, makes it clear that this is a subjective test, which is an extremely important issue. In Grand Committee the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said that the objective test was correct because the auditors were protected from having committed an offence by having taken reasonable steps. I suggest that that misses the point. That defence addresses a different issue of whether they took reasonable steps to issue the statement, but it does not address the auditor setting out his own views and not the views of someone else, or some hypothetical auditor on the Clapham omnibus. The issue is that the statement should be of the circumstances that the auditor thinks are appropriate, so I support the amendments.