I am very sorry that I did not realise that the Minister was responding to this group of amendments; I should have welcomed him to his first appearance in Committee. I hope he will come back—although he may have to spend a bit of time in hospital, having received a pass to speak on this issue from his noble friend.
This is a very complicated Bill. The Minister and I have actually talked about that over tea, and he is now learning the hard lessons of what he took as a light badinage before coming to the Chamber today. However, we are in a bit of a mess here. I was genuinely trying to get an amendment that would encourage the department to move forward on this issue, because it is quite clear from the mood around the Committee that something needs to be resolved here. The way the Government are approaching this is by heading towards a brick wall, and I do not think it is the right way forward.
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The Minister cannot ignore the evidence from the two very well-respected practitioners who have been involved in this sort of process and understand how it works that this is not the way forward. He has heard somebody who works professionally in this area explain how the system works in practice. He is hearing from individuals who, as we have now discovered, otherwise have nowhere to go. We are being told what seems to be a very confusing story about what the super-complaints system is about and how it will be done. This must be sorted, otherwise he will find that the Great British public, for whom the Bill is designed, particularly younger people, will turn around and say, “This is what you promised us?” They will not believe it and they will not like it.
All I heard coming through from the debate is that Ofcom will pick up a lot of complaints and use them to inform itself about what should happen five years down the track, the next time that the regulatory review takes place. That is not what we are about here. This is about filling a gap in a system for which promises have been issued over the seven long years that we have been waiting for the Bill. People out there expect the Bill to make their lives much more reasonable and to be respectful of their rights and responsibilities.
We find that the VSP provisions are being deleted—a system we already have, which at least does first approximation work. We find that we are reinforcing the inequality of arms between individuals and companies. We find that DCMS—it is not the same department because the Minister is now in DSIT, but it is his former sister department—is creating an ombudsman for gambling problems, having identified that they have gone too far, too fast, and are now out of control and need to be responded to. This just does not add up. The Government are in a mess. Please sort it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.