Home Information Pack (Amendment) Regulations 2007

I am grateful to the Minister for her long and detailed response. I am also grateful to everybody else who took part in this debate; as I expected, it has indeed proved useful. There is a fundamental problem here, which is that as a nation we have become increasingly punch-drunk on regulation and new systems, but it is instinctive for everybody to try to make it work. I have a deep feeling that so much of society works in spite of government and regulation, not because of them. Every time that we come along, saying that we can do by regulation something that will improve things, I personally doubt whether the actual improvement is real. So, we have a basic and fundamental difference in approach here, which will lead us never to completely agree. That is the reality. I was fascinated that the noble Baroness, when she responded to my complaint about the lack of published information on the studies done on the preliminary trials, said that the Government were still studying that information. That says to me that they put the whole edifice in place before they had arrived at a conclusion about whether the trials had been as effective as they expected them to be. That may be a misinterpretation of the Minister’s words—if it is, I apologise—but they are more or less the words that she used. So we have a difficulty. I was fascinated by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. To use a little alliteration and a slight misinterpretation of his words, he said that the Act is flawed and the pack is flawed—but, despite that, he finished up agreeing that the whole lot should go ahead. That seems a trifle inconsistent.