My Lords, I, too, rise briefly to speak to Amendment 60. I appreciate that there has been very substantial progress on this. It does highlight, though, the automatic tendency of government, when something needs to be enforced, to say, “Why don’t we ask trading standards to do it?”, without any thought about who in practice is going to be able to do so. I declare my interest, in being chair of National Trading Standards, although this is about local trading standards. Local authority trading standards departments have on average already faced reductions of 40% to 50%, and they may well be—we all wait to see what the implications of today’s figures are in practice—facing substantially more. They already have had a very large number of duties placed on them, couched in similar terms to this, and the Government keeps adding to the total.
Perhaps when she responds to this group of amendments and explains the solution that has been found in terms of this particular additional requirement, the Minister might tell us what arrangements the Government are going to put in place for all the other duties that are placed on trading standards departments to make sure that they can be effectively delivered. Indeed, perhaps in passing, she might want to tell us
the precise number of duties and pieces of legislation that trading standards departments are expected to enforce.