Companies (Miscellaneous Reporting) Regulations 2018

Debate between Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted and Lord Haskel

Monday 9th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome any attempt to raise the reputation of business and to increase the trust and confidence in business in the eyes of the public, so I very much welcome these regulations, but I wonder how effective they will be.

These regulations require public companies and large private companies to publish pay ratios and other data to show that the directors are taking into account the broader interest of customers, employees and communities, as the Minister has explained. These data are useful to provide more information to enable shareholders to question the directors and, if necessary, to vote at shareholder meetings. But who are the shareholders? Many shares are held by institutions, which are reluctant to act as long as the financial returns are as expected. Frequently they have a limited and sometimes short-term interest in the company. Also, much share trading is carried out by algorithms—and who knows on what formula they base their decisions? There are still many day traders active, and their trading, again, is based purely on numbers. As I understand it, this is the way the majority of shares now change hands.

I ask the Minister: even if the published data leads to naming and shaming, how effective will these regulations be in changing behaviour? I know there is a lot of concern about misleading comparisons between companies, but perhaps we should ask for other data to be published, such as benchmarking data on productivity so that shareholders can compare how well their company is doing in comparison with competitors.

Surely, there must also be concern about the reliability of the numbers. The big four accountancy firms almost exclusively audit for the large companies that are the subject of these regulations; they are also their financial advisers. In their role as financial advisers to these companies, I am sure that they will have lots of schemes to make the ratios look a lot more attractive. This joint relationship has come in for a lot of criticism recently. Is there any sign of any change so that these regulations will become more effective?

I welcome the rules applying to large privately held businesses. Most respondents in the consultation wanted to see more data about these companies and I hope that these regulations will produce it. Generally, I welcome these regulations, but would like to see them widened and made more effective.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I first apologise to the Minister for being caught out—