My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 62A, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles. We owe her our
thanks for bringing this important wrinkle in the Bill to our attention. She and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, have already eloquently set out the reasons why this amendment is needed, so I will not detain the House for too long.
The Bill creates draconian powers of investigation for the CMA, with associated penalties which, as we have heard, are much more suited to its duties of investigating market abuse. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, pointed out, the wording has actually been lifted from those duties. However, the purposes of the investigation set out in this Bill are very different from market abuse investigations. In this Bill they are investigations into the impacts of regulations or provisions made by the various national authorities. Businesses are not in this case being suspected of, or investigated for, market abuse, yet the Bill will mean that they will have to respond to notices subject to penalty as if they were.
Even if we reluctantly accept that these powers and penalties are appropriate—and I do not—we must surely ensure that the powers, and in particular the penalties, do not become an undue or unfair burden on business. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord the Minister had to say in this opening speech, and I am afraid that I do not think that the protections and the consultations that he mentioned go far enough in this case.
While larger businesses may be able to cope with such an investigation, small companies do not have compliance departments or in-house legal teams. They do not have the excess capacity to be able to deal with such investigations. Even in normal times, these investigations would be burdensome for small companies, and it is even more the case when they are trying to recover from the Covid crisis and at the same face up to the challenges that leaving the EU single market will create. This is no time to load additional burdens on to small businesses. Therefore, I urge the Minister to accept this simple—and, I had hoped, uncontroversial—amendment, or at least to come forward with some protections for smaller companies, as has been suggested.