My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this wide-ranging debate. Perhaps I might return to Amendment 61, where we began 54 minutes ago, and say to my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench that the purpose of this amendment was to assist the Lord Chancellor, not to undermine him. It was designed to give him some air cover by somebody saying, “Oi! You need to be doing something about the rates of return”. There was no fixed term to this; they could turn up at any time and say that. The idea was that they would somehow do it every year, but it would not be. It could be more frequently if interest rates changed sufficiently to justify the rate going up and down.
A permanent panel would have a role. The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, talked about the MPC, which is not the same sort of thing but it has a collective institutional memory. If you dissolve the panel after each time it sits, and start again de novo with the next review, that seems a waste of the experience, knowledge and know-how of making these things work that would be built up in the operation of a panel. My noble friend Lord Faulks said that it is a political decision and I agree. It is, which is why Amendment 61 says:
“The expert panel under paragraph 5 must advise the Lord Chancellor to undertake a review”.
It does not say that he must; it says that it must advise him and at that point the Lord Chancellor may say, “No thank you” and make his own decision.
Let us consider this situation. The Lord Chancellor has a wide range of duties so somebody will have to tip up one morning and say, “Lord Chancellor, it’s time you had a review of the rate”. Somebody in the MoJ will have to survey the rates of return available and the unlucky official who has to do that will know that it will be an unpopular thing to say because the Lord Chancellor will not want to get into the controversy of having to establish and justify a new rate. That will not be a popular moment, so the much more likely time for it to happen is when the unlucky official comes along and says, “Lord Chancellor, the three-year period”—or five-year period—“is coming to an end and you’ve got to do something”. We will have this series of events at the end of the period prescribed, depending on whether the Government accept my noble friend Lord Faulks’s amendment to have five years as opposed to three. I suggest that, from the point of view of efficiency, applicability and fairness, an expert panel being able to say to the Lord Chancellor, “It’s time we had a review” is a much better way to proceed and much more in keeping with the arrangements and purposes behind the Bill.
We shall obviously go no further on this tonight, but perhaps I can put it on the shopping list for when my noble and learned friend is kind enough to say that we can come and talk to him. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.