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

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.

In this report the Law Commission makes recommendations to form the basis of a revised Electronic Communications Code. The Code was enacted in 1984 to regulate landline telephone provision. It sets out the regime that governs the rights of designated electronic communications operators to maintain infrastructure on public and private land. In modern times, it applies to the infrastructure forming networks which support broadband, mobile internet and telephone, cable television and landlines. This project focuses on private property rights between landowners and electronic communications providers; it does not consider planning. The current Code has been criticised by courts and the people who work with it as out of date, unclear and inconsistent with other legislation. The reforms would: provide a clearer definition of the market value that landowners can charge for the use of their land, giving them greater confidence in negotiating and giving providers a better idea of what their network is likely to cost; clarify the conditions under which a landowner can be ordered to give a designated network provider access to his or her land, bringing more certainty to both landowners and providers and helping them to reach agreements more easily; resolve the inconsistencies between the current Code and other legislation; clarify the rights of landowners to remove network equipment from land; specify limited rights for operators to upgrade and share their network equipment; and improve the procedure for resolving disputes under the Code. It will be for Government to draft and implement a revised Code.

This Consultation Paper reviews the law governing the conduct of elections and referendums in the UK, and sets out our provisional proposals and questions for consultation with the public. This is a joint project by the Law Commission of England and Wales, the Scottish Law Commission and the Northern Ireland Law Commission.

This consultation provisionally proposed that kidnapping and false imprisonment should be replaced by one or more offences set out in statute. It was provisionally proposed that the offences should be made triable in a magistrates' court as well as in the Crown Court. Consultees disagreed, and on further statistical analysis it appeared that no significant number of kidnapping and false imprisonment cases result in sentences of less than 6 months' imprisonment. It was therefore recommended that these offences remain triable in the Crown Court only, with the existing maximum penalty of life imprisonment. In line with the model favoured by consultees, the creation of two distinct statutory offences to replace the existing common law were recommended: that false imprisonment be replaced with a new statutory offence of unlawful detention (a label which we believe better captures the nature of the offence) and a new statutory kidnapping offence. It was also recommended to increase of the maximum sentences for these offences from 7 to 14 years' imprisonment, in order to avoid undesirable inconsistency between the most serious instances of these offences and kidnapping offences of a comparable level of seriousness and that the offence under section 1 be extended to cover cases of wrongful retention of a child abroad, in breach of the permission given by another parent (or other connected person) or the court. This extension would close the gap in the law highlighted in the case of R (Nicolaou) v Redbridge Magistrates' Court.

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.

Scandalising the court is a form of contempt of court and a consultation paper (No.207 ISBN 9780118405324)) was published and ended in October 2012. An amendment to the Crime and Courts Bill designed to abolish the offence brought the Commission's consideration forward in order to produce recommendations in time to be considered within this legislative process. This report looks at the arguments for and against abolition as well the conclusions the Commission comes too.

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