My Lords, I am most grateful for the Minister’s response to that short debate and for the other contributions. I shall certainly look at the Court of Appeal judgment—was it the Court of Appeal? —and try to work through precisely where the problems are. There are two ways of dealings with this issue. One is to scrap the national tariff and put in a new payment scheme. The other is to start with the national
tariff and ask what the problems are and how we are going to deal with them, and I would quite like to work that through.
We may come back to this because there is an issue about how far the payment scheme is a national payment scheme and how far it becomes a local and varied one. That is a very interesting question, as is the way in which discrimination between providers may be implemented and for what purposes.
For the moment, though, I am very grateful to my noble friend for his response and for his promise to follow up on issues.