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Company Law Reform Bill [Lords]

I have been enjoying my hon. Friend’s speech enormously and agree with most of it—until just then, when he did indeed misrepresent the position of my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan), only in so far as he did not deny the merit of that the paragraphs that my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) has just explained and agreed with. No Conservative Member disagrees with those paragraphs; they are the established common law. What we are saying is that, by choosing a handful of existing common law obligations and putting them into a subsection over and above all the others, confusion could set in. Indeed, there could be a resultant reassessment of the established law. Of course, we shall discuss that issue at length in Committee, but I wanted to put him right now.