The twelth programme of law reform includes: Bills of sale; Firearms: scoping project;; The form and accessibility of the law applicable in Wales: advisory project; Land registration; Mental capacity and detention; Planning and development control in Wales; Protecting consumer prepayments on retailer insolvency; Sentencing procedure; Wills

Public bodies report that they cannot always share the data they need to share and, as a result, miss out on opportunities to provide better services to citizens. At the same time, the protection of privacy is fundamental to any data sharing regime. The law surrounding data sharing is complex. Powers to share data are scattered across a very large number of statutes and may be set out expressly or implied. In addition, there are common law powers. In this scoping project the Law Commission considered the following questions: are there hurdles to effective data sharing between public bodies (including private bodies engaged in public service delivery)?; Are those hurdles inappropriate?; How far do problems in data sharing stem from the law?; How far do problems in data sharing stem from other causes, such as a lack of training or guidance, organisational incentives and disincentives?; Would law reform solve or mitigate the problems? The Commission recommends that a full law reform project should be carried out in order to create a principled and clear legal structure for data sharing, which will meet the needs of society. The scope of the review should extend beyond data sharing between public bodies to the disclosure of information between public bodies and other organisations carrying out public functions.

This Law Commission report looks at the accurate contemporary reporting of the content of legal proceedings taking place in public in criminal courts. More specifically, this report focuses on the power of the Crown Court to order that such reporting be postponed to avoid prejudice to court proceedings. The Contempt of Court Act 1981 provides that publication of material which has the effect of risking serious prejudice to active court proceedings can in some circumstances be punished as a contempt of court. The Commission is concerned with all court reporting, whether broadcast (on television, radio or over the internet) or published (electronically or in print format) and whether by accredited press representatives or others such as bloggers. The recommendations would: ensure that court reporting postponement orders are all posted on a single publicly accessible website (a similar website currently operates in Scotland); include a further restricted service where, for a charge, registered users could find out the detail of the reporting restriction and could sign up for automated email alerts of new orders; greatly reduce their risk of contempt for publishers, from large media organisations to individual bloggers, and enable them to comply with the court's restrictions or report proceedings to the public with confidence.

A TSO version of a title previously published by HM Government.

A conservation covenant is a voluntary agreement between a landowner and responsible body (charity, public body or local/central Government) to do or not do something on their land for a conservation purpose. This might be, for example, an agreement to maintain woodland and allow public access to it, or to refrain from using certain pesticides on native vegetation. These agreements are long lasting and continue after the landowner has parted with the land, ensuring that its conservation value is protected for the public benefit. Conservation covenants are used in many other jurisdictions, but do not exist in the law of England and Wales. Instead, landowners and responsible bodies are relying on complex and expensive legal workarounds, or the limited number of existing statutory covenants that enable certain covenants to be enforced by specified bodies (for example, the National Trust). This paper considers the following key issues: who should be able to create a conservation covenant?; what should a conservation covenants be for?; should there be public oversight of a new statutory scheme?; how should conservation covenants be created and recorded?; how should a conservation covenant be managed? ; what should happen if there is a breach of a conservation covenant?; when and how should a conservation covenant be modified or come to an end?; could any existing statutory covenants be replaced by a system of conservation covenants?; what will be the impact of introducing a system of conservation covenants? A number of provisional proposals are presented.

The consultation paper Fiduciary Duties of Investments Intermediaries: A Consultation Paper follows on from the Kay Report on UK Equity Markets and Long Term Decision Making (see below), and uses pensions as the example, tracing a chain of intermediaries from the prospective pensioner/saver to the registered shareholder of a UK company. There are well established duties on pension trustees to act in the best interests of scheme members, and it looks at how far these duties require trustees to maximize financial return over a short time scale, and how far trustees can consider other factors such as environmental and social impact. The consultation asks: Whether the law is right to allow trustees to consider ethical issues only in limited circumstances? Whether the legal obligations on trustees are conducive to investment strategies in the best interests of the ultimate beneficiaries? and if not, what specifically ne