My Lords, I am glad to have the opportunity, by way of Amendment 3, to probe—I think it is literally that—how the Bill is to be interpreted in relation to the activities of various organisations. I am using universities as a way of trying to understand how it works. Clearly, universities are charter bodies. I assume they are not included in a definition of public authorities, since they do not exercise an authority of a public nature. That is question No. 1.
Question No. 2 is: if they are not a public authority under Clause 1, are they a public undertaking in that they are
“funded wholly or mainly from public funds”
or
“subject to contracting authority oversight”?
Are they subject to such an oversight? Is the Office for Students such a contracting authority? I suspect it might be, and might have oversight. Is the intention that universities, purely by way of an example, should be included in the definition of public undertakings for these purposes? If they are, I come back to Amendment 3 and say: perhaps they should not be because, as charter bodies, they are self-governing institutions and, I would have thought, can be perfectly comfortable outside the scope of the legislation.
I will not comment on other amendments in the group, other than to say that they afford an opportunity, not least for my noble friend Lady Noakes—I think she is not intending that hers be moved—to explore the way in which public contracts are to be defined, the extent to which there are exempted contracts within those and the rationale behind the listing of the exempted contracts in Schedule 2. I will leave that to my noble friend. Suffice it to say that I am, as my noble friend the Minister said, generally in a position of us trying to regulate less rather than more and to get to the point where people are clear where they are pursuing things competitively, where they are self-governing institutions and where they have other forms of accountability. Where we are not required by our international obligations or other reasons to impose regulatory requirements on them, we should try to avoid doing so. I would be grateful if my noble friend if he uses the example of universities as a way of helping us understand how the specific provisions in Clause 1 are to be interpreted. I beg to move.