Well, the healthiest on the Procurement Bill and constitutional affairs Front-Bench team. I thank the Minister, I think, for passing on his cold of last week to me.
My noble friends’ Amendment 105 is also a probing amendment. Clause 19 uses the word “appropriate”, and this amendment is to see
“under what circumstances it may be considered ‘appropriate’ not to undergo an open tendering procedure.”
There are no criteria or guidelines about what may be appropriate. This is just a probing amendment to see if the Minister can explain why such a wide-ranging word as “appropriate” is in the clause. Who will decide whether it is appropriate, and what guidelines or criteria would the Government expect the authority to seek in determining whether the open tendering procedure should not go ahead?
With Amendment 96, yet again, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, raises some important points in Committee by changing just one word. I particularly point to what she described as the “Alice in Wonderland world”, in which you can be debarred from one part of tendering but not have been given a contract—or the other way round. The noble Baroness’s suggestion to include exclusion from the tendering process in the Bill makes eminent sense or we will be in the position in which people could, by law, tender but would be debarred from getting the contract, even if theirs was potentially the best tender around.
With those comments, I feel that, particularly on Amendment 105 in the name of my noble friends, some clear guidance from the Dispatch Box would be welcome.