My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble and learned friend for his very full response. I am sure he will not be surprised when I say I am slightly disappointed at the way in which he has rejected quite a lot of the arguments that have been put forward from all quarters of the House. He rightly points out that the three-year period is a maximum, but I will have a sporting wager with him that when we come back here 20 years from now the reviews will be bunched around the end of the fixed period, whenever it is, because that is the way the political process will work.
As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, pointed out, the idea of the expert panel is that you build a body of knowledge and institutional memory about how these things will work more effectively, which will get lost if you have to constitute a panel every time.
As for advice, as the noble Earl said, Her Majesty’s Treasury has an interest in this case, as when you say, “We are going to change the discount rate”, it has to go back and redo its sums. This will be an interesting question that it has to face on each occasion. There remains confusion in the Government’s mind between instituting a review and instituting a change, and the two tend to get conflated.
There was a slightly strange suggestion that somehow there will be gaming around the meetings of the panel. That seems to me unlikely. I could not conceive why the panel would be announcing its meeting or why that would cause gaming in any way. No system is free of gaming, but this seems unlikely to lead to a greater degree of playing the system.
My noble and learned friend used a final rather strange phrase. He said that there was a social impact to the decision. I was not clear what social impact meant. This seems to me a clinical decision about the rates of return, which the Lord Chancellor must make. The social impact does not seem to me part of this discussion. Perhaps I have misunderstood what he said, so I will read Hansard carefully. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.