My Lords, I move Amendment 115 and speak to Amendment 131. They need to be taken together. We have covered a lot of ground in the last couple of groups, so I will be brief. We have looked at the role, functions and operational mechanisms of the Bill’s proposed office for the internal market and have also covered what happens if and when things go wrong.
The emerging view—although it is not shared by the Minister—is that the Bill has not got this right. Amendments 115 and 131 which, as I said, need to be considered together, take us in a new direction. I take the feeling of the Committee that we are talking about an independent body, which has to be a UK body. As was rightly said by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, being a UK body does not mean that it also part of the individuals it is supervising.
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That has implications; as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said, we will need to ensure that it is not advisory, because it will need quasi-judicial powers to have any authority at all. It needs to have the confidence of the devolved Administrations and a common sense of ownership, as my noble friend Lord Judd said, and it needs to be independent of all the four Governments it will be considering. It also has to have their buy-in—so it is a double whammy in that sense. So it needs to be given powers to deal with the unfair market practices that it discovers, which may well have been introduced in good faith by the various devolved Administrations but which prove in practice to be inimical to an internal market. It also needs to be accountable to all four Parliaments—to the Senate and the Assemblies.
So it begins to look like a very different body from that described in the Bill. If, as I think we all now agree, the managed divergences will be initiated and established on a voluntary basis by the common frame- works process, surely it follows—in terms of symmetry if nothing else—that the body established to oversee these outcomes needs to be given the powers to do so. In accepting these powers, it must be seen to be independent and not bolted on to another body with a different focus and culture. It needs to be trusted to be an unbiased referee.
The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, got it right when she worried about the danger to the CMA if the OIM, even without the powers I think it should have, were bolted on to the CMA as it currently is. So my model would be Ofcom or even the National Audit Office. The only argument against this seems to be the injunction not to create new quangos—which, coming from a Government who are about to establish the Trade and Agriculture Commission on a permanent basis, feels a bit rich. I beg to move.