I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and my noble friend for their response to this amendment. I can see from the illustrative regulations that, as I said earlier, there would be a general scheme for the collection of information, and I am not looking for the amendment to replace a general scheme with a requirement to issue individual information notices. That would be excessive and burdensome. However, under the illustrative regulations there is, in addition to the general scheme, what is effectively the restatement of the power for the Secretary of State additionally to require specific information from companies that breach the requirements of the general scheme—frankly, for any other purpose that the Secretary of State is looking for. That is in draft Regulation 19(2), which really just restates what is already in the legislation: that there is this general ability to say “just give me this information”.
I entirely understand the point that my noble friend is making about the appeal against enforcement, but there is no appeal against such a specific information notice. I may not have got it absolutely right, but in the case outside the general scheme of information, when the Secretary of State asks a company to provide specific additional information, I was proposing not an appeal against enforcement of request, where the company resisted, but for the company to be able to appeal against the information notice on the basis that it is an excessive use of powers; that is, rather than a judicial review, an appeal against that specific information notice.
My noble friend referred to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s view, which relates specifically to the question of with whom the information may be shared. The illustrative regulations really do not add anything from that point of view; they do not tell us, beyond what the legislation already states, with whom they may be shared. From any company’s point of view, there is little reassurance in the restrictions that the Minister has just referred to. The information could end up in all sorts of places. Remember, we are talking about an NHS body and, of course, all NHS bodies always behave absolutely properly in the use of information under all circumstances—I am being ironic.
From the point of view of a company engaged in selling these products, we are talking about a monopoly purchaser—a single payer—and a set of organisations with tremendous financial leverage in relation to the products that are being sold. If we are simply handing all the information over to the Secretary of State in the expectation that he could—I am not saying that he would—hand this information on to NHS bodies which are themselves the purchasers of these products, it could significantly skew what would otherwise be a proper commercial relationship between seller and buyer.
Companies must have a point at which they can cry foul, but I am not sure that we have yet given them the ability to do so at the appropriate stage when the information is being asked for. In a way, my amendment does that. I was rather comforted by the DPPRC’s report, in that it seemed to me that my amendment at least
sought to make clear how the DPPRC’s recommendation in relation to the Bill might be met. I am implying in what I say that I can see how the amendment is not right; we could go further.