My Lords, I am sure the Minister will pick up on the noble Earl’s Voltaire reference and tell us that we live in the best of all possible worlds. In my previous intervention, I mentioned the Government’s productivity. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, appears to be spoiling that, trying to do in two Bills what the Minister is trying to do in one. I think one Bill on this may be enough.
The point raised by the noble Lord on utilities, developed by the noble Earl, is extremely pertinent. It is a wider question that spreads into things such as the Building Safety Act, for example, where there is an assumption that utilities have a particular role to play. Are hardwiring, broadband and things such as that utilities or not? There are wider implications in this than simply the nature of the Bill. There are questions to be answered.
There is also a precedent already forming in the Bill about public services being carved out. That is the NHS issue, of course, where separate legislation is pulling out some aspects of the jurisdiction of this Bill. I do not expect to have that debate on this group, because the Minister has helped us to move everything into one group. We can have that debate later, but the principle of carving things out has been accepted by the Government. In that respect, the tablers of these amendments have something to go on. The interesting question they are providing through these amendments is: what is in and what is out? In a sense, that covers part of our curiosity around the Bill.
We should not be too obsessive about this, and nor should the noble Lord opposite, because Clause 109,
“Power to amend this Act in relation to private utilities”,
allows the Government to turn the whole thing upside down anyway. Clause 109(1) says:
“An appropriate authority may by regulations amend this Act for the purpose of reducing the regulation of private utilities under this Act.”
In fact, none of this debate makes any difference because, by regulation, the Government can ignore themselves in any case. We already have a problem, Houston.
The noble Lord talked about the difference between private delivery of services and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, talked about the fact that these organisations took on risk. With the train operating companies, when the risk turned around they just surrendered their licences. It is not real risk in the sense we might understand it in the private sector; it is a different world.
For that reason, I find it very difficult to go along with the amendments that try to extract private delivery of public service from the Bill’s ambitions. Large sums
of money that have, lest we forget, originated from the pockets of UK citizens in the form of tariffs, fares or subsidies are then disbursed, or potentially disbursed, by the private companies as they procure things to deliver from their private sector the public services they are pledged and allowed by licence to supply. The Bill may, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, set out, interfere with the board’s licence to operate on a wider scale when it decides how to go about making purchases, but that is not unreasonable, given that it has hitched its wagon to a public service. When capital enters the business of delivering a public service, in my view it sacrifices the true independence to operate that it would have if it delivered a private service to private individuals. That is the deal: business gets to ply its trade on the condition that government and usually a regulator, but not always, meddle with its business model. It is a condition to operate.
For this reason, I am very interested to hear how the Minister will respond to your Lordships’ questions. These have been very worthwhile amendments and I thank the tablers. I look forward to the Minister explaining, first, what a “public service” is, secondly, what a “utility” is and, thirdly, where they sit in the context of the Bill.