My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their comments and the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, for his humour and for his lessons in how to amend Bills, which will be useful when I return to the Back Benches.
We believe that the commissioner will be able to achieve maximum impact by publishing reports on complaints only if he or she has the discretion when to use this power in a targeted way. Amendment 25 would require the commissioner to publish a report on every complaint that he or she considers. We believe that that is unnecessary. The commissioner may, for
example, consider a series of very similar complaints and may find that there is little value in compiling a report for each separate complaint when the activity could be captured instead in the aggregate annual report. In other cases, the complaint might have arisen from very particular circumstances, meaning that the determination had no wider application and was of little public interest. We believe that the commissioner should have the freedom to decide. This is a matter of his independence.
I turn to Amendments 26 and 27. A blanket approach of publishing the names of respondents, as set out in Amendment 26, has the potential to be unfair—for example, when a complaint is not upheld. It could indeed encourage mischievous complaints. Under this proposal, anyone who was complained about would be the subject of publicity. Giving the commissioner the discretion to choose whether to name the respondent will be a real incentive for businesses to work constructively with the commissioner, to pick up on the last discussion. We will see a real change in behaviour being encouraged.
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Amendment 28 would remove the obligation on the commissioner to allow the parties to a complaint to make representations about the publication of a report on that complaint. The right to be heard is an important safeguard to ensure that both parties to a complaint can make their cases and, to recall my earlier example, to allow for necessary accuracy checks to be made before a report is issued.
On Amendment 29, a good point was made about the CMA because the CMA may well find these reports useful in its wider work, but the commissioner does not need a power to send the reports to the CMA. Under the existing provisions, annual reports and individual reports can go to the CMA.
As the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, explained, Amendment 30 would allow the commissioner to make recommendations to the Secretary of State on access to finance for small business. It is a vital area for growth and innovation. We now have 5.4 million small businesses and lots of different sources of finance. In the interests of time I will not go through them all, but the Small Business Commissioner is being set up to address poor payment practices and focus and consider complaints in this important area.
Small businesses may seek general advice on a range of matters. Issues such as finance may be brought to the attention of the commissioner. The advice and information that we will provide online and the links from the website will be important, as will the report that the commissioner makes each year on the most significant matters raised. However, I am afraid that I agree with my noble friend Lord Hodgson that this amendment would broaden the work of the Small Business Commissioner too far, and I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.