My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that answer, if a little disappointed. As I learned in making my application for information and in going through the tribunal and afterwards, if you allow this difference of treatment, you are effectively saying to all the institutions covered by the Freedom of Information Act that all they need to do is claim “commercial confidentiality” and they will not have to publish anything. Anything that is commercially confidential is information that might affect a student in making a decision about which institution to patronise. Therefore, anything really important and interesting becomes unpublishable, and so the freedom of information registration has no function—except to find out what
the vice-chancellor had for breakfast, which is clearly not commercially confidential and therefore we can continue to plague them on that. There is no point in registering institutions for the Freedom of Information Act if you then disapply it on such a large scale by failing to register their competitors. I understand that the Government have reached a decision and I will not trouble them again at Report, but I think that they have gone down the wrong road on this. For now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.