Legislative Reform

I can assure the House that I will be as brief as possible so that we can make progress. I thank the Minister for his exposition of the order, which allayed a number of my fears. However, there is a world of difference between removing the obligation to advertise in newspapers and discouraging insolvency practitioners from advertising in local newspapers. We have to be careful lest the one stray into the other. There is a big push to use the internet. I am a great supporter of the internet, but we must recognise that it has limitations. A benefit of the age in which we live is that, as the marketing industry knows, we have several different channels for reaching the market. The old ones do not necessarily fall out of use, and are still appropriate in the right circumstances. We must achieve a balance between, on the one hand, access to information and the protection of creditors and, on the other, the need to reduce red tape and costs. I would differentiate between large companies, which trade widely and for which local newspapers are not particularly relevant, and small and medium-sized businesses, which are the backbone of our industry—they are certainly the mainstay of my constituency—and local newspapers play a major role for them. The notices that appear in those publications are well read, newspapers at that level are accessible—people can pick them up, read them on the train, and fill in time wherever they are—and, most importantly, they are trusted. At the moment, in relation to insolvency, the internet is not always trusted, and there have been a number of cases in my constituency in which companies have gone into liquidation but the liquidators have not been quick enough to stop the internet trading arm continuing to trade, so people have lost their money. They just go into the pool of creditors, even though the normal business has stopped trading. I am all for reducing red tape. We may not be here specifically to benefit the media, but the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) are right. We must recognise the state that the local newspaper business is in. It is facing hardship, and we need to ensure that we do not damage it even further. I therefore seek reassurance from the Minister that, if the measure goes through, insolvency practitioners will not actively be discouraged from using newspapers; that newspapers will continue to have the means to convince insolvency practitioners of their value; and that we will monitor the process to ensure that, ultimately, creditors do not lose out.