My Lords, I shall add some questions to those posed so far on this group. Before I do, I thank the Bill team for the technical briefing this morning that I took part in remotely and for the further information that the Minister promised and which was provided and circulated with the explanatory statements. They were helpful. Of course, they do not answer all the questions, but that is the purpose of Committee.
Overall, it begs the question as to where we stand on the overall proportion of procurement that would be under covered and non-covered areas, and what is now under exempted areas. The Minister rejected my call for an updated impact assessment. At the moment, we have no information as to what level of procurement we are dealing with in these new areas. It would be helpful if the Minister could say what proportion of the procurement is now likely to be within the covered, non-covered and exempted areas.
With regard to ownership and persons, I posed a question to the technical team this morning, so I hope they have had time to provide some information to the Minister. There seems to be an assumption in the drafting that contracting authorities are either public or private bodies, but it is less clear on the other areas within the broad public sector, where there are, effectively, trust models for the delivery of services. These do not fall neatly into the category of a public or private body. Indeed, I am aware of procuring bodies that delivered services in the Scottish Borders, my former constituency area, that were hybrids between purely public authority bodies, charitable bodies, pension funds and public interest vehicles. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm whether Amendment 11 will cover all these areas. If it does not, there will still be gaps when it comes to some of the consortia which are both traditional centralised bodies, as we discussed on Monday, and those that are other trust models.
I turn now to my second question, which I also posed to the technical team—to be fair to them, I got some form of answer. It relates to contracting authorities acting jointly when one is English and one is Scottish. What legal framework will they be operating under? The Bill team—I hope I relate this correctly; they have no right of reply, so I hope I am fair in what I say —noted that, later in the Bill, there are regulation-making
powers to cover these areas. However, my concern is that, presumably, we would not be expecting regulations to be brought forward to suit individual contracting authorities acting jointly where one is Scottish and one is English. This is a slightly different point from which the Minister said on Monday he would write to me, because it relates directly to this amendment. I did not receive a letter clarifying these cross-border issues. The Minister may say that he was rather busy—