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Companies Bill [Lords]

Yes, I was coming to the size of the market. Ethical investment has probably got much further than ethical consumption, but even ethical investment is still not fully developed. Last year, ethical investment went through the £10 billion barrier for the first time. That sounds like a lot of money, especially compared with gross household savings, which are about £40 billion. However, a lot of the funds moving into ethical investment are moving from existing investment funds, so the percentage of new investment—new saving going into ethical investment—is rather less than the quarter it appears to be. On the ethical consumption side, matters are far less well developed than that. A report by Co-operative Financial Services found that a third of UK consumers claim to be concerned about ethical consumption, yet only about 3 per cent. of the UK market for goods and services is clearly ethical in its production methods and aims. We believe that ethical investment and ethical consumption have great power. They have the potential to change the world. The hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) talked about ending capitalism. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches take the traditional Keynesian view that our job is to make capitalism work for better ends. As Keynes said, eventually he knew which side of the barricades he would be on, but nevertheless capitalism has to be reformed if it is to be worth continuing. One problem, as we see it, is ethical consumers and ethical investors finding out whether the information out there about the behaviour of particular companies is believable, accurate and true. We believe that an expanded business review, especially with an audit requirement, would help those customers and investors to find out where their ethical pounds would be best placed. In that process, audit is crucial. That, again, is where we differ very strongly from the hon. Member for Putney. Our view is that, without proper audit, the business review will turn into a marketing tool. Already, a large number of companies give the impression that they are environmentally and socially responsible, but not all their claims can be taken absolutely at face value. All too often, companies already do precisely what the hon. Lady said they would do if the audit requirement was introduced. They highlight isolated examples of good practice, but fail to mention the full picture. Our view is that there is a threat in current unaudited practice to the whole ethical investment and consumption market. It would be a great shame—even a disaster—if corporate attempts to ““greenwash”” operations led to public distrust and cynicism about the process of ethical investment and consumption. The auditing of claims made in business review reports would help to concentrate the minds of those who write them and increase the trustworthiness of the information that they give. As the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton said, the better companies would welcome that, because they would then receive the advantage they deserve over the companies that are interested merely in public relations, not in thoroughgoing ethical behaviour. If the opportunity arises, we would like to press new clause 75 to a vote. It is independent of the success of new clauses 1 and 2. Even if those new clauses are not accepted today, although we hope they are, it will remain true that the audit requirement in the original OFR should be put back in place in the business review that the Government, at this stage, want to establish.