My Lords, I apologise to the House. I understand I was on the list for Amendment 5, but I never applied to speak on that one.
This is an interesting amendment. My colleagues, the noble Baronesses, Lady Noakes and Lady Neville-Rolfe, have already made the point that we are very close to 1 January—in fact, we are 66 days away, by a quick calculation—and so I look at that time dimension against the complications within this proposed new clause.
As I said much earlier in the evening, I am a marketing man by profession; I worked very closely with a large number of manufacturers when I was
a senior director in one of the major advertising agencies. I find some of the elements of this amendment, or proposed new clause, too prescriptive. Take subsection (1)(a), where the whole principle is that nothing is going to happen until the
“access principles may be applied”
and have been “exhausted”. We are in a time framework where that is not going to work. It may be necessary, later on, to look at how it does work in principle, and maybe some changes should be made then.
I worry deeply. We are a creative nation. We are in an enormous period of change. One sees now what is happening in the fintech world: it is moving forward at an enormous rate, and it does not want to be stultified by a whole series of restrictions before it can be added to a particular schedule or not. All of us are conscious that there is a whole variety of different companies, across the world, trying to find an answer to Covid-19 through new drugs and vaccines.
Personally, I am terribly practical, and I just do not see the elements of this amendment helping the United Kingdom move forward. There may be bits of it that have some relevance—I am sure there are—and I recognise that they are put forward with a genuineness by people who want things to work. But when I listen to the noble Lord opposite talk about the Welsh Government, and having observed what is happening down in Wales now, one has to say that it is not terribly practical. I am not sure that the credibility of the Welsh Government is very strong in today’s world.
I hope my noble friend on the Front Bench will understand that, perhaps in the future, some of these elements may need to be applied, but, as matters stand today, with 66 days to go, frankly, I do not think that this proposed new clause helps at all.