I am very grateful to the Minister for his careful and detailed reply. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, is on to a good point there. If it is an SI Act 1946 statutory instrument, the Act contains the praying procedure. It would indeed put a Minister perhaps in rather a difficult position, having to defend the case, while having, as it were, abrogated responsibility. That is no doubt something about which we will hear, perhaps in a further edition of these exciting letters.
I do not quarrel with the proposition that the OfS will be best placed to make the assessment, but that does not necessarily mean that the OfS should be able to engage in the law-making process. I fancy that we have once again encountered what we encountered last Wednesday: two reasonable people can disagree about something without either of them being unreasonable. Issues of policy and principle arise in this group of amendments which might well benefit from being reconsidered on Report, but in the meantime I am very happy to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.