I take the noble Baroness’s point but the critical thing here is that the powers set out in the Bill are constrained by giving effect to healthcare agreements, which themselves sit under the aegis of the creation of international agreements. My noble friend’s letter set out how the entire so-called CRaG arrangements govern how they ought to be approved. To satisfy my noble friend Lord Cormack’s concern, it is simply not the case that this Bill could be used unilaterally to fund the healthcare of the people of Venezuela, which might be a concern of the leaders of the Labour Party, as he pointed out.
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I wanted to speak on this because there is a misconception that the purpose of this Bill ought to be to limit itself to provide continuity of the arrangements we have. That is a purpose of the Bill and the Government have been very clear about it. They were clear when I was a Minister and they are clear now my noble friend
is the Minister. However it also gives us the opportunity—and why should it not?—to strike similar arrangements reciprocally with countries with which we want to deepen partnerships. It falls to this Committee to debate appropriate ways in which scrutiny and accountability are provided to look at those arrangements. It may be that the Committee believes it is necessary to put in different kinds of arrangements for different kinds of deals, a point my noble friend Lord Lansley made at Second Reading. However, it does not seem to me that because of a need for a more sophisticated approach to scrutiny based on what kind of agreements are being put forward it follows that this Bill should limit itself to repeating and continuing the deals we currently have as a result of our EU membership.