{"id":55,"date":"2006-11-14T22:27:30","date_gmt":"2006-11-14T22:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=55"},"modified":"2006-11-15T00:10:20","modified_gmt":"2006-11-15T00:10:20","slug":"the-etch-a-sketch-approach-to-legislation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=55","title":{"rendered":"The etch-a-sketch approach to legislation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Companies Bill became The Companies Act 2006<\/a> last week. I’m technically (and somewhat scarily!) a company director, so it’s something that I need to be aware of, although I’ve got to admit that I’ve not followed the progress of this one as closely as I did the other recent Bill to be passed – Charities Act 2006<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This one is big. It’s apparently the largest Bill ever<\/strong> to go through Parliament. At one of the last debates on the Bill a couple of weeks ago, the amendments being discussed filled 319 pages<\/a> so I shudder to think what the whole Act would look like if printed!<\/p>\n

There is some new stuff here – such as removing the need to have a company secretary unless we<\/a> want one (although without wanting to preempt the discussion we will have on this, I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t) and removing the need to have an Annual General Meeting (AGM) unless we want one (although I think as a charity, we have to have one anyway!). These changes are described as attempts to reduce the administrative burden of running a business, so it will be interesting to see if it does actually make our lives easier.<\/p>\n

There are new requirements for how we report decision making – in particular about environmental issues, employment issues and social and community issues. At first glance, a lot of these look like codifying best practice in corporate social responsibility – ensuring that companies consider the impact that they have, on the environment, employees and the local community, and that this is reported and made public in a transparent way. I’m sure that our responsibilities will become clear over the next few months. But in general, ensuring corporate social responsibility and the sort of “forward looking narrative” that the Act talks about promoting in company reports all sounds positive to me. <\/p>\n

(That said, I’ve read statements from more than one group who feel that the Act doesn’t go far enough<\/a> in this area. ) <\/p>\n

The bulk of the Act though is intended to replace the company law which has gone before it. As described by Lord Sainsbury<\/a>:<\/p>\n

the Bill … will in effect be a complete code of company law. All the company law provisions of the 1985, 1989 and 2004 Acts have been brought into the Bill… This I feel sure makes the Bill very much more useful to practitioners … Our intention in this exercise has been to restate the old law in more modern terms … <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The idea of moving from having “the law” defined piecemeal across three major pieces of legislation to starting again with everything in one revised and updated place seems sensible to me. The “etch-a-sketch”, “it’s all rubbish”, “throw it all away and start again” approach does make me smile though. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

It’s not massively urgent to get our heads round all the implications of this right now. Although it received Royal Assent last week, the current plans are that it wont take effect until October 2008<\/a>, and there are still plans for consultations on how it will be implemented. So we’ve got time to find out how it will all effect us. And with a demo to do to the IET<\/a> tomorrow, and the SYA Annual Awards Evening on Thursday, there’s probably other things that I should be doing now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Companies Bill became The Companies Act 2006 last week. I’m technically (and somewhat scarily!) a company director, so it’s something that I need to be aware of, although I’ve got to admit that I’ve not followed the progress of this one as closely as I did the other recent Bill to be passed – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}