That is a point well made. Indeed, the whole issue of the increase in the use of regulations by the Government is something that various Select Committees and other committees have commented on. It is a real difficulty because you do not know what the regulations will be. The legislation just gives the power to the Secretary of State to make regulations; you then wonder what they will be.
If I understood her amendment right, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, asked why some provisions in the schedules, perhaps really important ones, do not apply if a supplier contravenes them before the Bill becomes an Act. It strikes me that the self-cleansing we talked about earlier would have to be pretty dramatic if, on 26 February 2023, a firm was found guilty of breaking some of the mandatory conditions laid out in Schedule 6 then, on 3 March, it said it had dealt with those but you could not take into account the five days before when it had broken a lot of the conditions because it was before the Bill become an Act. Is that really what the Government intend? I am not sure because, when I read it, I could not quite make this out. I think that the point of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, is to try to understand exactly what the Government are getting at. What does “before” mean? There are a range of things in that.
The central point I want to make in speaking to our various amendments is that, if all these things are unnecessary around all these things that are really important, how are the Government going to achieve these objectives, many of which are part of their own policies? Many of us wish to see the Procurement Bill used as the vehicle to achieve that but the Government are resisting, and will resist, that. How will they be achieved if not through this Bill?