My Lords, I did not want to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, in full flow as he introduced the amendments, but I believe he made an error in terms of the categorisation. The error is entirely rational, because he took the logical position rather than the one in the Bill. It is a helpful error because it allows us to quiz the Minister on the rationale for the categorisation scheme.
As I read it, in Clause 86, the categories are: category 1, which is large user-to-user services; category 2A, which is search or combined services; and category 2B, which is small user-to-user services. To my boring and logical binary brain, I would expect it to be: “1A: large user-to-user”; “1B: small user-to-user”; “2A: large search”; and “2B: small search”. I am curious about why a scheme like that was not adopted and we have ended up with something quite complicated. It is not only that: we now have this Part 3/Part 5 thing. I feel that we will be confused for years to come: we will be deciding whether something is a Part 3 2B service or a Part 5 service, and we will end up with a soup of numbers and letters that do not conform to any normal, rational approach to the world.
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I am sure that a rationale does underlie that—the people who wrote the legislation will of course have come up with the schema for a reason—but it is important to push on that, because we want our legislation to be intelligible to people out there. Again, it would be entirely logical to have a schema that says, “1A: large user-to-user; 1B: small user-to-user; 2A: large search; 2B: small search; and 3: pornographic”. If the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has her way and we add extra services, we could make them categories 4 and 5, and we could have categories 4A and 4B.
Again, I hope that the Minister can take this opportunity to respond on the substance of whether there should be different requirements and to explain why we have that categorisation, where category 2B is small user-to-user services, category 1 is big user-to-user services and category 2A is search and combined services. That would probably not be the first assumption of most people in the House, and it has been bugging me since I first read the Bill, so it would be nice to get an answer today.