Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006

My Lords, I shall add two brief points relating to procedure. I listened with some care to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, but would say that we have improved procedures for scrutiny of statutory instruments. It is precisely because of concerns of the type which have been expressed that the Merits Committee was set up only a year ago. We now have its report, which goes into some detail about who was consulted and when. I am sorry that the Insolvency Practitioners Association does not think that it was listened to, but it is surely rather wide of the mark for the noble Lord, Lord Newby, to say that the Government ignored what it said. I do not know whether the Insolvency Practitioners Association was slow off the mark, but all of these matters have surely been considered in great detail. We cannot have it both ways. We cannot say, ““This thing has been going on for a long time. Why haven’t they got it right?”” when some of these considerations are now on the table—at least they are on the table before us today—and the statutory instrument is in front of us. It states:"““Made 6th February 2006  . . . Laid before Parliament 7th February 2006  . . . Coming into force 6th April 2006””." A wide range of people has been consulted and not everybody is over the moon about the regulations. However, as I understand it, we cannot just make our own transfer and insolvency arrangements as if there are not 24 other countries in the European Union. Will the Minister comment on that? We do not want to jump from the frying pan into the fire by having some system that looks somehow perfect so far as the traditions of our insolvency practitioners are concerned only to find ourselves trying to find some certainty within a range of different traditions to reflect continental subsidiaries of UK companies and vice versa. This goes back to the argument about why we entered Europe in the first place. We know that it is overwhelmingly to the advantage of industry that regulations of this type have been made in Europe going as far back as 1977. They are among the earliest and most time-honoured of all the social-dimension regulations in the European Union. The Insolvency Practitioners Association perhaps needs to gain some further understanding about how it will do its work against the background of the procedure being done and dusted and having been carried out correctly and with great care.