Lord Browne of Ladyton
Main Page: Lord Browne of Ladyton (Labour - Life peer)Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill [HL]
Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, as I explained on the first day in Committee, having set out to legislate in language that is,
“intended to be easier for everyone to understand”—[Official Report, 22/5/12; col. 761.]
that is, in plain English—it is arguable at least that the Government have failed that test in the first effective sentence, which is in the third line of the Bill. It reads:
“There is to be a Groceries Code Adjudicator”.
As I argued on the first day in Committee, I know no one who speaks plain English who uses that construction. This is not the most important issue that we will discuss in relation to this Bill but it gives your Lordships’ House an opportunity to discuss this issue of plain English, which occupied us intermittently throughout our debate in Committee. Unfortunately, we did not find a comfortable way in which to deal with all aspects of this and some of them may recur in our deliberations on Report.
In order to make my point, I attempted to improve this sentence by simply amending it to read, “There will be a groceries code adjudicator”. I was told by the Minister that that changed the meaning of the sentence and that the construction I had chosen was a prediction and not a statement of fact. However, she graciously agreed to take this matter away and to think on it. Perhaps I may say that that was not surprising because, arguably, the sentence:
“There is to be a Groceries Code Adjudicator”,
also appears to me to have an element of prediction about it.
However, the Minister having graciously offered that opportunity, I grasped it. I too have thought about this sentence. With the assistance of a conversation with the Bill team, I now propose an amendment which reads:
“A Groceries Code Adjudicator is established”.
Now neither of us is in the prediction business. We are in the present tense and this Bill will now establish a groceries code adjudicator, which I hope will find favour with the Government. At this stage of my short life in your Lordships’ House, I should be delighted if I were able to improve a piece of legislation. This is an opportunity for the Government to accept this amendment. I beg to move.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, this side is entirely supportive of my noble friend’s amendment. I simply ask the Minister if she could briefly update us on her conversations with the noble Lord, Lord True, and his concerns about plain English and the sense of the preambles in the Bill, which were raised in the last moments in Committee.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)
My Lords, the issue of plain English was raised at Second Reading. It was revisited at some length in Committee. The Government have considered this further. Noble Lords will recall that we discussed the possibility of saying, “There will be an adjudicator” or “There shall be an adjudicator”. I am glad to say that the proposal in the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, is consistent with previous Bills and, I hope, clearer for those reading the Bill. In the spirit of this, and having heard the positions of several noble Lords in Committee, I would be happy to accept the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Browne.
As to an update on my conversations with the noble Lord, Lord True, I have a fulsome response for him later in the proceedings. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, will kindly leave it until then for me to respond.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, I hope I do not spoil the achievement of having the Government accept this amendment, but I cannot resist the temptation to express how delighted I am that I have managed to effect change to legislation in your Lordships’ House. I am absolutely sure that as we devote a substantial part of the immediate future to discussing the immediate future of your Lordships’ House, this will be cited as a historic moment in which the revising powers of the Chamber were exercised to the benefit of the ordinary people of the country.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, the effect of this group of amendments is to anticipate the passing into law of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, which my noble friend Lord Borrie referred to in the previous debate and the provisions of which will combine the competition authority with the Office of Fair Trading. Those two bodies will be merged to create the Competition and Markets Authority. In Committee I spoke to a similar group of amendments but I did not press them too hard because I anticipated that I would be met with an argument that those amendments were premature, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill being at the early stages of its passage through Parliament. I was not disappointed because the noble Baroness explained in reply that that was exactly her position. I refer noble Lords to col. 99 of the Official Report of the first day in Committee.
The Government’s opposition to this group of amendments was one not of principle but of timing. The noble Baroness pointed out that as the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill had not yet received a Third Reading in the other place—indeed, I think that it only goes into Committee tomorrow in the other place—it would be presumptuous of the Government to accept an amendment at this stage, and that she or another Minister would table similar if not identical amendments at a later stage once the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill had matured and crystallised sufficiently for such amendments not to be presumptuous.
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, on the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, I appreciate that the Competition and Markets Authority, when established, is likely to take on the functions of the OFT and the Competition Commission that are relevant to the adjudicator. The Bill will eventually need to be amended to reflect this. We were very grateful for the noble Lord’s understanding attitude in Committee and suggested that these amendments should be considered at a later stage of the Bill.
Last week, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill passed through Committee in the House of Commons but is still some way from enactment. For this reason, the Government believe that these amendments are still somewhat premature. Furthermore, I ask noble Lords to note that Clause 58 of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill includes a power to make consequential amendments to enactments, including enactments made in the same Session as that Bill. Even if this Bill were not amended during its passage to refer to the Competition and Markets Authority in place of the OFT and the Competition Commission, that power could later be used to bring it into line following enactment. Today the noble Lord has asked why the same approach is not taken on every Bill. The answer is that each Bill is different and the Government will consider what approach to take on a case-by-case basis. In this case, where it is relatively easy to amend either Bill at a later stage, the Government have decided to amend it at that later stage and I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for responding to my amendments in what I suspect is the only way that she could. I am reminded of an experience that I had when I was a young solicitor with a client who had a dreadful drink problem. On one occasion I met him in the cells of the local sheriff’s court, and he had a summons for being drunk and incapable and a summons for breach of the peace. I asked him how he was pleading and he said not guilty. I said, “What’s the defence?”, and he said, “As far as breach of the peace is concerned, I was so drunk that I couldn’t speak, so I could not have been shouting and swearing. I am an alcoholic”. I said, “What about the drunk and incapable?”. He said, “I’m teetotal. I don’t drink”. I said, “These defences would appear to be inconsistent”. He said, “But you’re a young man at the beginning of his legal career. You will learn that two separate cases have two separate defences”. I am struck that to some degree my life has come full circle.
I do not intend to press this to the vote at this stage, but I hope that at some point the amendment, along with the position that the Minister has been put into in trying to defend these contradictory positions, may encourage those who draft legislation to be a wee bit more consistent. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, the amendment goes back to the basic problem about the relations within the food supply chain between the supermarkets and small and medium-sized suppliers and all the attempts to enforce the code and its predecessors without statutory backing. Whether we like it or not, there is an atmosphere of apprehension, anxiety and fear among small suppliers to supermarkets, and a feeling that if they raise problems with the supermarkets under the code, they are in danger of retaliatory action at some later stage—their contracts will be ended, curtailed or put on to a less beneficial basis.
I am aware that this was discussed in Committee and indeed there have been discussions about it since it was first raised, but Clause 2 still appears to allow disputes to be referred to the adjudicator only by the supplier themselves or, alternatively, by the large retailer. My amendment would explicitly allow a case to be referred to the adjudicator by a third party—an appropriate trade association or a farming union—and this would relate to issues that covered more than one supplier, or perhaps only one supplier but where there were general implications of the outcome of that particular case. The amendment would allow third- party initiation by a trade association or farming union but possibly also other third parties that were appropriate—for example, an agricultural charity.
This would not be an open-ended requirement. As with the large retailer, the adjudicator would not have to take the case under this amendment. While Clause 2 requires the adjudicator to take a case from the supplier, although not the large retailer, my amendment would give the adjudicator sufficient grounds for not taking it, on the grounds either of it being trivial or vexatious or because of a lack of prima facie evidence. The argument that this would be used against the supermarkets on spurious grounds by campaigners who were opposed to supermarket activity in unrelated fields would not be a good reason for rejecting the amendment. It would relate to genuine supplier problems but it would protect the supplier, the farmer and the small business from the fear of being retaliated against at a later stage. It would support that supplier if the NFU or trade association took up the case.
I appreciate that the Minister may not like the wording—her officials rarely do—but this must be something on which she could go a little further than she did in Committee to assure us that third parties could take such cases. Only that, I feel, would put an end to the apprehension and the fear among small and not so small suppliers, which are at a serious disadvantage with supermarkets. They would be protected under this code and other legislation. I beg to move.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, I will speak to the amendment standing in my name, which seeks to insert a mechanism for ensuring the independence and the qualifications of an arbitrator appointed under the code by reference to the provisions of this Bill. It generates, I would argue, a valuable opportunity for the Minister to explain a very complex part of this legislation, which, without an explanation in the Official Report of our deliberations, I fear may not be understood by those who come to apply, or seek to apply, the provisions of this Bill in relation to the code.
As we have already heard, this is a unique piece of legislation, because the basis of it is a code that is owned by the Competition Commission. If the code is repealed, then all this legislation becomes redundant. I embarked on the amendment of this particular part of the Bill because of my then limited understanding of both the arbitration legislation as it applied in England and Wales and the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010, which has been passed by the Scottish Parliament and, in part, now applies to Scotland, but which is not yet fully commenced. I was unsure how all these things interacted, but I was certain that at some stage it would be necessary for the Government to make it perfectly clear that the provisions of that legislation, which were carefully debated and thought through both in this Parliament and the Scottish Parliament, and were designed to generate an independent and properly qualified process of arbitration, would properly be applied to this legislation when enacted and to the processes that it was creating. The more I got into it, the more I began to appreciate just how important that was.
With the leave of the House, I will take a few minutes to explain some of this complexity but will leave it to the Minister to explain how all this works. In my discussions with the noble Baroness and her Bill team, both of whom have been extraordinarily generous with their time and in explaining this, we have between us uncovered areas in which this Bill and the code could be improved. I have not endeavoured to do that in this particular amendment, and have removed other amendments that I proposed, because I am confident that at some stage in the progress of this Bill the Government will themselves bring forward some amendments that deal with those issues that have now been uncovered.
This amendment, on plain reading, concerns the qualifications and appointment conditions for an arbitrator under the Bill and has had the benefit of shining a spotlight on a particularly unclear and potentially confusing part of the Bill. To understand how this Bill works, one has to understand the interaction of the arbitration provisions in the Bill with the existing arbitration laws in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and also with the arbitration provisions in the code itself. It is not easy to follow all this. We are not helped by the fact that the Explanatory Notes compound this lack of clarity rather than resolving it. In particular, paragraph 30 states that the provisions of the Arbitration Act 1996 will “broadly” apply and that,
“the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010 will broadly have a similar effect in applying the Scottish Arbitration Rules, except so far as this would be inconsistent”,
with the groceries supply order or the Bill. That was not intended to be clear. It is intended just to report the position which is quite difficult to work out.
“(c) the reasons for the findings and any action taken or proposed”
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, Clauses 4 to 10 govern how the adjudicator should conduct investigations and carry out his further powers of enforcement following investigations. Amendment 10 would amend Clause 5, which is the second of those clauses which relate to the publication of reports following investigations. The clause requires the adjudicator to publish a report, which is appropriate. Subsection (2) sets out what the report must specify as a minimum. The amendment would add to that minimum requirement the requirement for a statement of reasons for any finding made by the adjudicator and any action taken or proposed to be taken by him. I moved a similar amendment on the first day in Committee at col. 119 of the Official Report, where I set out the arguments for a requirement for reasons in a report in these circumstances. I do not intend to rehearse those arguments other than to say that it is my firm belief that, if reasons are set out, such a requirement would reduce rather than increase the possibility of challenge at a later date. In the absence of reasons, my experience is that people challenge to find out reasons.
This is consistent with my whole approach to the Bill—I say this for the benefit of the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, who has not had the opportunity to hear me speak in support of the Bill or of its objectives. I have in the past expressed my strong support for the Bill and the mechanism that it creates. My purpose in seeking to amend the legislation is to try to make it clearer, and to make it work more effectively and in a way in which those who need to have confidence in it can do so. I understand the necessity of the legislation, which has to be put at the heart of a relationship which is otherwise deeply unfair and potentially operates to the disadvantage of smaller suppliers. It is helpful to have this opportunity to make it clear that that is my objective. If I am seen to be unduly technical or legal about some of the amendments, I reassure noble Lords that they are all designed to make the legislation work better and to give the Minister the opportunity to explain the necessarily complicated process of how it will work. It may not have been immediately obvious to everybody that there was clarity in the Minister’s response to the amendment that I proposed earlier. I commend her for that, because it will enable those who need to read the reports of our debates to understand the mechanism much better.
When I moved the amendment in Committee, I was grateful for the support of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, and my noble friend Lord Borrie. I was grateful, too, for the implied support of the Minister, who said that she thought that it was reasonable that the report should give reasons. She offered to speak to me further about it. I have taken advantage of that opportunity and have had a conversation also with her Bill team, whose help in advancing some of my intentions in relation to the Bill I have referred to. The result of that is a changed amendment which I hope is more felicitously worded than that which I proposed in Committee. I commend the amendment to the House and beg to move.
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, I do not wish to repeat the arguments made in Committee but I support these two amendments.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, before the Minister speaks I should perhaps indicate—for the purpose of the record—that I also support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising. I think it is entirely consistent with what is fair in relation to the conduct of this process.
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, as I said in Committee, the reports that the adjudicator must publish at the end of each investigation are a vital part of his or her accountability, and an important way of keeping retailers, suppliers and consumers informed of his or her work. While I can understand the intention behind the amendment of my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising, I am not sure that it is necessary. If a retailer wishes to make a public comment on the report, it will be free to do so by issuing a press release or publishing a statement on its website. For this to be included as an annexe to the report itself would appear somewhat unusual, particularly as there would—due to confidentiality—be less possibility of a similar statement from any suppliers.
Furthermore, we think it important that the report is clearly the adjudicator’s report and the adjudicator’s alone. The report should be fair and impartial and should not be coloured by commentary from a retailer with which the adjudicator may or may not agree. As I say, the retailer will be free to make its own statement, and similarly the adjudicator will have no right to have his or her comments on that statement included in it. I therefore ask the noble Lord not to press that amendment.
To move on to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, I said two weeks ago that this was interesting and reasonable—he repeated my words exactly—and upon further consideration I am happy to say that my opinion has not changed. It is eminently sensible to require the adjudicator’s investigation reports to contain the reasons for the decisions made, and I am therefore happy to accept that amendment.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, I am overwhelmed by the scale of my success this afternoon. I suspect I may retire from the lists now. This will be a day that I will never repeat. I thank the noble Baroness for her consistent approach in this case. I thank her and her Bill team once again for their co-operation and engagement with me in an attempt to try and make this amendment work better, and it does. I think that we have, between us, improved the Bill.
Lord Plumb
My Lords, I can assure you that my noble friend Lord Howard really is a noble friend, although in this respect we disagree on the way forward. His amendment suggests that enforcement measures taken by an adjudicator, including naming and shaming, will be subject to the right to appeal to an appeals tribunal. This would surely lead to sclerosis of the adjudicator’s operations and the appeal could become bogged down in an attempt to enforce the groceries code. As we have already heard in the debate so far, there are avenues for retailers if they believe a decision is unfair, such as judicial review. This is the case with the Food Standards Agency. It could refuse to take remedial action, and a Competition Appeal Tribunal is available for making those decisions, such as with the OFT or the commission. I said earlier and I repeat: the adjudicator will not make competition decisions. The job is to investigate whether the groceries code is coupled with fair play in the marketplace. I therefore do not support this amendment.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, out of consistency I support the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, in Amendment 14. I said in Committee that my view was that the appeals processes, the potential of judicial review which has been generated by this Bill and the existing law are unnecessarily complicated and could be greatly clarified. I do not think that the issues at stake in relation to a decision such as naming and shaming are of anything other than the order in which it is guaranteed that a large retailer will test by judicial review whether or not that decision is appropriate. I expect—and we should anticipate—that these issues will be of such moment to large retailers that they will deploy their legal resources in a way that guarantees a degree of review of any decision. Had the noble Baroness been minded to accept Amendment 11 proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, I would not have felt it necessary to support this amendment, which introduces to the Bill what I consider to be not only an element of fairness, but one of reality. Had the noble Baroness been minded to allow or require the adjudicator to publish with any report of an investigation the response of a large retailer and make it public, then I would have thought that this would have been sufficient. In the absence of that, a large retailer will want to be vindicated and we will get litigation. It would be better contained inside the process. I know this is not a position supported by most people who broadly take my view of this legislation, but I support it.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, if this regime is to work in the way in which all parties in this House intend it to work, suppliers will have to have complete confidence in the confidentiality of their communications with the adjudicator. One can envisage a reluctance from small suppliers, who will see the possibility that they will lose future contracts, from communicating with the adjudicator if they do not think that he and his staff will respect that confidentiality. The purpose of these amendments directed to Clause 17, which deals with the adjudicator’s obligation of confidentiality, is to toughen that obligation up. These five amendments do that in two ways. Two of them extend the obligation of confidentiality beyond the adjudicator to his or her deputy and staff. Two of them remove “may” and make the obligation of confidentiality overtly mandatory and not potentially discretionary by replacing it with “must”, although I am prepared to accept as a matter of law the point that the Minister made when she responded to a similar amendment in Committee. The fifth and last amendment creates a criminal offence for a breach of confidentiality. I will speak to them by reference to the Minister’s responses to similar amendments when we discussed this in Committee.
In relation to extending the obligation beyond the adjudicator to the deputy adjudicator and his or her staff, the Minister’s response was that she was confident that that obligation was already extended beyond the adjudicator. As the Minister and others who were there will remember, we were pressed for time on that day because we had a joint ambition to conclude the Committee stage by a particular time. I am inviting the Minister to go beyond a simple expression of confidence and to explain the mechanism that makes her so confident that the obligation on the adjudicator applies also to the deputy adjudicator and the staff of the adjudicator’s office when it is not spelled out in the Bill.
As far as replacing “may not” with “must not” in terms of respecting confidentiality is concerned, we have already discovered today that in the positive “may” and “must” are not interchangeable. But I am told that “may not” and “must not” have the same force, which I think is right as a matter of law. That is the expression the Minister used; I do not claim credit for it. It occurs to me that if we are legislating for the public and both words mean the same, if we mean “must not” why do we not say “must not”? If we are endeavouring to encourage a degree of confidence in this role on the part of people who are deeply vulnerable then we should say “must not” if we mean “must not”.
Finally, and this is a much more important point, there is a lacuna in this Bill that the obligation of confidentiality is not backed up by any sanctions for breach. We are all aware of the vulnerability of electronic communication and therefore the probability that almost every public office will leak. Something will get out. There is no sanction for a breach in this Bill because the Minister told me that she is confident that the adjudicator and his staff will respect confidentiality. In my time in Government I worked in five different departments and I had confidence in all of them that they would not leak and that they would respect confidentiality. I might find it difficult retrospectively to find evidence that that confidence was well placed.
The Minister went on to say that if a person suffers damage from a breach, then there is the potential for that person to claim damages from the adjudicator or to seek an injunction to prevent a disclosure. But it will be too late if it is leaked. The injunction will mean nothing. In any event, unless one gets a super-injunction, as we have discovered in this country, the very fact that one is seeking an injunction always reveals or at least points to the information. It is very doubtful that any of the people whom we are seeking to protect by this legislation will be in a position to get a super-injunction, not that we would want them to, so they are left with damages.
I envisage this sort of situation. I am a supplier to one of these great monoliths, one of the 10 supermarket chains that we are seeking to regulate by this. I supply them with whatever—fresh strawberries or something; it does not matter. I have a complaint. I tell the adjudicator. The adjudicator says, “There is something in this complaint. In fact, this reveals a very important issue. I am going to take this all the way”. It leaks to my retailer that I was the cause of this complaint. It has caused them a lot of embarrassment and probably cost them a lot of money. I do not get another contract. I challenge anybody to tell me how I will convince any court against the battery of lawyers I will face if I choose to sue Tesco or Asda or any of the 10 retailers—I should not name them; it does not matter who it is—that the damage that I suffered was a direct result of the fact that I complained to the adjudicator. It will be impossible, so there needs to be a sanction. The Minister in her response to me in an earlier debate implicitly accepted that there needs to be a sanction. There is no sanction. Injunction does not fit the bill and it is fanciful to think that small suppliers—everybody is small compared to these supermarkets—will be able to take on the challenge of proving in an action against the adjudicator that it was the adjudicator’s negligence in allowing the confidentiality to be breached that caused the loss.
The Bill needs to impose a criminal sanction to toughen up the confidentiality obligation to the maximum effect. I am supported in this because there are many other pieces of legislation in which this device is used. I have uncovered two but I am sure that researchers would uncover many more. I already know the answer to that so the Minister does not need to deploy the answer that she deployed against me earlier. They are different pieces of legislation so these are different sets of circumstances that require different responses. I am a great believer in consistency. If we can impose a criminal offence on, for example, the legal aid authorities if they breach confidentiality then we should impose the potential for criminal offence on the adjudicator and his staff. I beg to move.
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, the adjudicator’s obligation to maintain strict standards of confidentiality is integral to the Bill. I therefore thank the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for his careful consideration of how we can make these standards exacting.
As I said in Committee, the Government are confident that the deputy adjudicator and people acting on behalf of the adjudicator would be bound by the duty of confidentiality as set out in the Bill. The deputy and the individuals acting for the adjudicator have no functions which are independent of the adjudicator and can only carry out the adjudicator’s functions. In doing so, they will be subject to the same restrictions as the adjudicator. If a person acting on behalf of the adjudicator breaches Clause 18, normal agency principles will make that a breach of Clause 18 by the adjudicator. Additionally, we are convinced that the words “may not” and “must not” have the same force and meaning here.
The noble Lord has raised the issue of plain English with regard to the amendments. We are confident that the Bill has the correct legal sense as it stands. Although it would not be wrong to use “must not”, we believe that “may not” is slightly better here. The words “may not” in their context here are clearly intended to be prohibitive. If they were permissive, it would mean that the adjudicator was allowed not to make unauthorised disclosures, which would not make sense. If further clarification were needed, the words “prohibitions contained in this section” are used in Clause 18(5).
The noble Lord has also suggested that the creation of a criminal offence is needed to discourage breaches of confidentiality. This seems unnecessary, as the adjudicator will be a public authority and be expected to take his or her statutory duties very seriously.
Perhaps I might also remind noble Lords that Schedule 1 provides for the Secretary of State to,
“dismiss the person if satisfied that the person is unable, unwilling or unfit to perform his or her functions”.
Serious breaches of confidentiality, either personally or from those working for him, have the potential to satisfy these requirements. We therefore believe that the threat of dismissal will be a sufficient deterrent, if indeed a deterrent is needed.
There are therefore ample reasons for the adjudicator and those working for the adjudicator to take care over confidentiality. I agree that strict confidentiality requirements will be essential if the adjudicator is truly to eradicate the climate of fear that we are aiming to address in the Bill. The Government are confident that the Bill provides for these requirements as it stands. I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for the care that she has again taken to address these issues having previously thought that she had seen me off in Grand Committee. I am pleased that we now have further clarity about the basis for her confidence in relation to the extension of the obligation to the deputy adjudicator and his staff—that is helpful. I maintain the position that, if “must not” and “may not” mean the same thing, “must not” is preferable, particularly when you are trying to build confidence among people who are in a weakened position—if they were not in a weakened position, we would not be doing this. I am disappointed, however, in the Minister’s failure to appreciate that there needs to a sanction for a breach of confidentiality which does not imply the dismissal of the adjudicator himself, because that, too, is about building confidence. If people see that a criminal offence will have been committed if their confidentiality is breached, their confidence in the legislation will be increased. I hope that the Minister’s confidence that there will be no leaks is well placed. I will regret it, as much as she will, if she is wrong. I just think that, in this internet age that we live in, it is fanciful to imagine that we are capable of creating an organisation that is leak-proof. However, I have been seen off on this occasion and I shall not come back. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.