Mr. Tim Bush:

Since these issues have been quite well aired in the UK over the past year, particularly around the presence of the 2005 letter, the Financial Reporting Council, FRC, has been wound up as a body and will be replaced by a body called the audit, reporting and governance authority, which will be a properly constituted public body with a constitution set by Parliament. There has been one odd thing in the middle of all of this: everybody was acting as if the FRC was a private sector body. It was operating with private sector wages, was not subject to freedom of information and was not subject to public sector procurement rules. A journalist submitted a freedom of information request and found that the Office of National Statistics, which determines whether an entity in the UK is a public body, determined in 1990 and again in 2005 that the FRC was a public body. The FRC was acting, however, as if it was a private sector body. The new authority is in the process of implementing the necessary safeguards to be a public body with public pay, which might need pay capping, and changes will include not being able to use the same firms of lawyers that the accountancy firms use, and an obligation to respond to freedom of information requests. It is quite remarkable that a body such as the FRC had been operating in that way for so long.