Compensation Bill [HL]

Of course. The noble Lord will know from his colleagues who have worked with me that that is precisely what I always do. I always ensure that noble Lords have time. The noble Lord is right that they should be on the record. When I spoke of reading the report backwards, I meant that when one reads something that suggests that the Bill needs work, it is reassuring to read it backwards and to discover that one could meet all the concerns without much difficulty. That is important. I am absolutely clear that we shall do that. I have deliberately left it until Report stage as there may be other issues that might affect those amendments. I want to meet noble Lords halfway. This is one of those occasions when I have been slightly ministerial, in that I take what the noble Lords, Lord Goodhart and Lord Hunt, have said very seriously. Noble Lords have both raised the issue—this is not the advice that I have been given, I hasten to add—about having an exemption which, in a sense, is a procedure that is very well laid out through Parliament, as it were, and then a waiver that is given to another body. The only issue on which I have been won over—I want to put this before both noble Lords—is that there is a question of what we might call a temporary waiver, which I think I raised within my letter to the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. Where a body is quite clearly going to be exempt, we are concerned that we might miss people as we go through the exemptions. We want to be able to waiver them while waiting for the exemption but it is not clear on the face of the Bill that that is what we mean. I undertake to go away and come back with something which says, ““In the event of a waiver being used, it is a temporary waiver””. We can discuss very happily with noble Lords the issue of how long that might be for, but its purpose would be not to make somebody operate illegally when it is quite clear that we need to exempt them but have not been able to do so because we have not had time. It is a kind of parliamentary time point. I hope that will meet noble Lords’ concerns about this unknown regulator having this power and the concerns in my department that having an absolute removal of the waiver could accidentally have a detrimental affect on certain organisations, which no noble Lord would wish to see. I am very happy to come back and discuss this issue. As I say, I am acting in a personal capacity—this is not the advice I received—and I see the point very well. If I come back on that basis, I hope the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.