My Lords, this has been a valuable opportunity for us to begin to explore one of the most important issues arising from the Bill, as well as one of the most technically complex. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, made the important point, in addition to the observations that I had made, that for many years insurers pocketed the state payments of lump-sum compensation. Again, that needs to be taken into account in evaluating where justice lies.
I am particularly grateful to my noble friend Lord Wills for supporting my amendment, but the majority of noble Lords who have participated in the debate have preferred to focus on whether the start date for the scheme should be February 2010. I do not doubt that that is where the focus will remain when we revert to this matter.
My noble friend Lady Sherlock asked the most beautifully expressed and forensic questions, about which she was too modest, but there is no question but that the interventions of the noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath, were like flashes of sheet lightning across the proceedings of the Committee. He gave us some remarkable figures about the sheer scale of mismanagement, before he came to the rescue through Equitas, but also the sheer scale of loss, I fear, to the interests of this country in many important respects, because of the sale of the assets of Equitas at a huge discount to Berkshire Hathaway.
I was, however, particularly struck by what the noble Lord had to say about the documentation. If the DTI has somewhere in its vaults great crates of documentation dating back decades concerning employers’ liability insurance, the Minister may well have to go back to the drawing board to start again. We do not want him to do that, because we want the scheme, in a significantly improved version, to hasten to the statute book.