My Lords, first, I apologise to the Minister that, due to a misreading of the Order Paper, I was not here to hear his first couple of minutes.
The Minister gave us a fulsome presentation of the changed position of the Government which explained in considerable detail how these new powers would work. Those of us who sat through Committee and Report will know that the Government were faced with a pretty widespread view across the House that they needed to change their mind on retail exit. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, headed a series of debates which eventually brought the Government to change their mind and present these new clauses that are before us today.
It is of course a pity in many senses that this comes so late. Given this stage of the Bill, which has gone through both Houses of Parliament, it is difficult to deal with such a complex set of amendments. I am sure that when the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, put amendments in this direction on the Order Paper at an earlier stage, and certainly when I did so, we did not expect to create quite such a substantial job-creation scheme for parliamentary counsel, but the Government have done a major job here and it would be churlish to quibble too much about it. However, there are problems
with it. We all welcome deathbed conversions, but the central problem here is the lateness of the conversion. I wish that we were a stage earlier in the proceedings, when we could have tried to make minor amendments to the proposed clauses.
I echo the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, in particular that there are several points in this, from the first new clause onwards, particularly in the very first line and the reference to protecting consumers, where “must” really ought to be substituted for “may”. With a bit more time, the Government might have come to that conclusion themselves in the instructions that they gave to counsel. However, we are where we are, and this is a major concession by the Government to the House. In a sense, the whole process has been a vindication of the way in which the House considers complex legislation and minds are changed—and we have the result here before us.
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It would be churlish to make too many quibbles about these amendments, but the issue of procedure is still with us. The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, are, in a sense, giving the Government a bit of a lifeline on this issue, because I would imagine that when the Bill goes back to the Commons there will be some consternation at the size of these amendments and the fact that they have not been signalled at an earlier stage. The reassurance to be given to that House and to this one that the first regulations under these provisions would be introduced under a super-affirmative resolution would be very substantial.
The Government ideally ought to accept the noble Baroness’s amendment. That would put the whole process back in order, and give one more chance to Parliament to look at these proposals in detail. If the Government are not quite in the position to do that, they have a Commons stage to go through, and there is the possibility of minor amendments in that direction in Parliament. I do not and will not oppose in any way the substance of what we are talking about, but I think that the noble Baroness and her colleagues have a strong point on the procedure forward, and the Government—if I can gently put it this way—would be wise to recognise that today in one manner or another so that we can allow at least some form of further scrutiny of an incredibly complex set of amendments.