Mr. John Shine:

Yes, transition happens at the moment but at a low level. It is a handful per year. An unknown number of companies espouse the co-operative model. It is difficult to determine how many. There are approximately 260,000 companies on the Companies Register. A small, though possibly not insignificant, number of those reflect the co-operative ethos in their constitutions. Why have they been operating under company law? Probably because they did not consider the existing legislation to be attractive. There are advantages under company law that are not available at the moment, such as audit exemption for the smaller players, the stronger corporate governance regime and so on. A cohort has been operating under company law and can comfortably operate under company law. There is no issue with that and some may decide they want to continue to operate under company law. However, we hope they will move under the co-operative legislation, which is designed specifically for co-operatives and which will have many of the advantages of company law, such as audit exemption, the stronger corporate governance regime and so on. We expect quite a number of companies to convert to co-operatives under this legislation. The number would be purely speculative because as I said, we do not know how many are on the register, but we certainly envisage a flow in that direction.