Northern Rock plc Compensation Scheme Order 2008

My Lords, the discussion so far has rightly concentrated on paragraph 6 of the order before us. I cannot match the erudition of the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, on the definitions used in that paragraph, but, surely the reality those words reflect is that without government intervention Northern Rock would have gone bust in September of last year. Therefore, is not the effect of that, and of those assumptions, to value the shares at zero? If that, as it appears, is the case, I would be grateful if the Minister could say a bit more about what he envisages the valuer doing. Why does he need a staff to do it? How long it is going to take to do it? And how much is the process likely to cost? The Minister may recall that my colleague, Vince Cable, pointed out at an early stage that if the Government had only taken his advice on nationalisation, they would have saved millions of pounds in fees for Goldman Sachs. In order not to make the same mistake again, will the Government accept an offer from my noble friend Lord Oakeshott to value Northern Rock shares for nothing, and to do so extremely quickly? There has been much speculation about legal action. Shareholders, both small and large, have contemplated legal action. I suspect that for the hedge funds they have to proceed with legal action to cover the fact that they made a huge bet and lost. For small shareholders, it seems to me that legal action poses a number of risks. First, they are, understandably, very frustrated at the situation in which they find themselves. Whether or not the shares are valued at nothing, they are clearly going to be valued at virtually nothing. They quite understandably are, first, looking to see who to blame, and, secondly, against whom they have a course of action. It seems to me that there is a real danger that they may go down a legal route and put in a lot of money pursuing legal avenues, which are offered to them by unscrupulous lawyers who see this as a way of making a significant amount of fee income. I hope very much—I do not expect the Minister to comment on this; it is obviously up to small shareholders to decide what they are going to do—that they are dissuaded from spending significant amounts of their own money on legal actions, which are almost certainly bound to fail. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, asked the Minister about two documents which featured quite large in our debates on the nationalisation Bill. The first was the framework agreement. The framework agreement is, as it were, the instructions from the Government to Ron Sandler about how they want Northern Rock to be run. It is not the business plan. When we were discussing the matter with Ministers and officials on the day of Second Reading, we were given the impression that this document was virtually completed and that it might be ready for scrutiny by your Lordships when we came to Committee stage and took the Bill through the following day. That was, bar a day, three weeks ago. As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said, we find it extremely surprising that what must be, by definition, a short document—possibly it has not been concluded—has not been put in the public domain. We feel that the Government gave the House the impression that this document was ready to be put in the public domain within days of our discussions, if not hours, and it would be very interesting to know why that framework document has not hit the Library at least. The second document is the business plan. As the noble Baroness said, we understand that that has to be submitted within the week. I would again like to have an assurance from the Minister that when that business plan goes to Brussels it will be available for public scrutiny. Finally—it is almost like a coda to any discussion on Northern Rock—the noble Baroness raised a big issue about Granite and the fact that the ONS has been able to give a degree of clarity about Granite which Ministers, either by accident or design, have completely failed to do on the Floors of both Houses and in the letter sent to my colleague in another place, Vince Cable. Perhaps I may repeat her questions. Will the Minister confirm that ONS has decided that all the assets of Granite will be included in the Northern Rock debts which will sit on the Government’s books, and that the total amount is therefore in the order of £90 billion? There is still a reasonable amount of confusion about a number of aspects of Granite, but if the Minister could at least give confirmation about that issue, it would be one less area of confusion to which we would need to return in the future.