Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

I shall explain the way I see it and deal with the things that may be relevant this afternoon. We are talking about the charter, which we have produced in draft to aid scrutiny of the Bill. I hope that people will think that that is helpful. There were, quite rightly, demands to see it, which is why we produced it a week ahead of the Committee stage. It will be formally laid in another place following Royal Assent to the Bill, so it necessarily remains in draft until that point. We will listen carefully and, if there are issues that touch on the charter that could in our judgment improve the drafting, we will take them on board. The relevance of the charter is how it fits with the architecture relating to the responsibilities of the OBR. We also have to remember that certain things in the charter do not directly relate to the fiscal mandate but are background information to it. I take the point that we should not get too far into discussions of irrelevant things, but intergenerational fairness is part of the fiscal objective that is in there as background information to the fiscal mandate, which comes in the subsequent paragraphs and links directly to the responsibilities of the Office for Budget Responsibility. The noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, is correct that intergenerational fairness can take on different definitions, but here we are using the term in a fiscal context to mean that future generations should not be burdened by deficits or the cost of servicing debts accumulated to pay for consumption by current or previous generations.