My Lords, that was the very definition of a wide-ranging debate. I do not want to delay the Committee for too long, but I must just say that I appreciate the difficult hand that the Minister is having to play at this stage. I reflect on the fact that I have been in this House for just over eight years, and during that time, there is not a single piece of legislation I have been involved with that has been delivered with the intention that the Ministers wanted. All have failed for one reason or the other, and all are coming up for some form of revision at different points. It seems to me that yet again we have a problem in drafting and delivery that will bedevil this Bill as it goes on.
I also have to say that I do not really think it is that radical a Bill. As the chairman of a public limited company, I think that the Government, who have been pressing the corporate sector to take ESG and other matters more seriously, have been leap-frogged by the private sector and are quite behind. There can be a better process in thinking this through to delivery—one that either takes a different form of comply or explain, or other sorts of things—but the Bill is starting to get to the point where it does not really address the issues or create good behaviour. In the end, we are going to
end up with an overreliance on decisions made by people who I suspect have not really seen how these things work in real life. So, while I beg leave to withdraw my amendment, I think it is important to understand that over time we may live to regret quite a few of the provisions we have put in this Bill.