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Small Limited Liability Partnerships (Accounts) Regulations 2008

As the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, indicates, the regulations, which are being debated together, are not in themselves controversial. I await with interest the Minister’s answer to his question. I wish to put on the record, as perhaps the Minister did not do the Government justice in her opening remarks, how much I approve of and appreciate the way this is being done. When the Bill that became the Companies Act 2006, which turned out to be the longest Bill in the history of your Lordships’ House, was being debated, one of the points we made at Second Reading was that it was a serious error not to regard it as a consolidation Bill. Eventually the Government acceded to that argument and produced it as a consolidation Bill. I hope this is a precedent for all future regulations under the Bill. It ought to go on record how important it is that they take the form of option C as set out in the impact assessment, rather than option B. Had option B been implemented for the purposes of these regulations, the only beneficiary would have been the publisher Butterworths, which would have had to have sold more copies of its book for people to plough through in order to try to cross-relate the relevant sections of the Companies Act to these regulations. I welcome the fact that option C has been the approach, so we have a set of regulations that stand on their own which anyone can read when they see what has to go into accounts. I hope that, the consolidation of the 2006 Act having been achieved, future regulations made under it can take this form rather than requiring people to cross-relate to the legislation. I wanted to say that, and I hope that Hansard will reflect it.