God bless the man: I have an excuse to speak for another six minutes. First, all the evidence that we had from our witnesses—it is all on the internet; people can read it and it is available in the Printed Paper Office—is that “no detriment” is completely unworkable. The report says that if on either side of the border, a change of policy results in a change in the money available to either side, the other side should compensate it. I will give an example. When I was Secretary of State, they privatised water in England. In Scotland, my noble friend Lord Lang decided that we were in enough trouble; he did not privatise water. As a result, of course, Scotland no longer got the Barnett consequences of the public expenditure on water in England, because it was charged, and we had to find from within the Scottish block the money to pay for water.
My understanding of the no-detriment principle, if it means what it says on the paper, is that in similar circumstances under the new arrangements, if in England they decided to privatise or stop doing something and that resulted in a lesser grant to Scotland through the
part related to the Barnett formula, then England would have to send Scotland a cheque. That seems to be rather unworkable. The idea that because England, say, had privatised water, it should send a cheque to the Scots to enable them to continue with a state-run, inefficient system, does not seem to be practical politics. I might have got this completely wrong, but every time I ask the Minister or the author or its exponents what it means, they say, “This is a matter for negotiation and we cannot possibly comment, because it has all been done on a secret basis”. It is just not acceptable to proceed beyond Committee until we have answers to this and many other questions that I will seek to elucidate for my noble friend by tabling lots of amendments.
6.08 pm