Clause 57
Company Law Reform Bill [Lords]
9:00 am
Vera Baird (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs; Redcar, Labour)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. I understand that it is a completely new provision, and I invite the Opposition to comment on it. However, it was not supported or buttressed by any pressure group—not by the Law Society or the Institute of Directors, the company secretaries of major companies or any list of people who might have been expected to respond if it was likely to be a problem. It is not clear to me where the thrust of the provision is coming from, and we have not received any submissions.
I shall probably serve the Committee better by setting out other words that could be sensitive—words that could imply national or international pre-eminence. For instance, the word “British” will need a significant amount of protection, and I see that Opposition members agree. Approval of that word in a company name would depend on how it was to be used. The Secretary of State would normally expect the company to be British owned—a realistic thing to think—and it would probably be necessary to show that the company was pre-eminent in its field in order to merit that epithet and description. The company would need to show that it was pre-eminent by providing supporting evidence from an independent source, such as a Department or trade association.
The same goes for the words “English” and “England”, and “Scotland” and “Scottish”. “Wales” and “Welsh” would probably fall into the same category. It would be hard it distinguish them in any realistic way from “British.” The same applies to “Ireland” and “Irish”. If a company wanted to use one of those words as a prefix to its name, similar conditions would have to apply as apply to the word “British”, and approval would have to be given for such use. The same would apply if the word were used as a suffix.
It will usually be possible to get approval only if the person can show that the company has its main business in the country concerned. It would be rather odd for a company to call itself “Welsh” if its factory was in my constituency of Redcar. I cannot think of a company in Redcar with “Welsh” or “Wales” in its name; that was just an example of how curious it would be.
One cannot rule out, however, the chance that somebody might want to use the word “Welsh,” perhaps to describe Welsh cakes or something of that kind, even if they are not made in Wales, but I imagine that one would have to go a long way before being able to register “Welsh” in the name of a company, if the business was in Redcar, or in the constituency of the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt). For instance, in Reigate, it would be odd to call a company “Welsh”.