European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, says that he is confused about the transition; my worry is that the people on the Bench in front of him remain confused about what a transition period means—but let us put that to one side.

I want briefly to broaden the discussion to regulations—I know that the amendment refers to directives, but it is probing and there is an important issue here which Ministers may have heard. The clinical trials regulation was mentioned at Second Reading. Like many of the measures that we are discussing today, that would have been adopted but not implemented, either because it was complicated or it took a lot of work to get everyone lined up to it—so it would not have reached its implementation date by the time we left. It might well reach that date during the transitional period—which raises another question and, probably, another Bill. If it is a standstill only on measures that have come in by the day we leave, there will be important issues to address such as the clinical trial regulations and those others that we have heard about today. They will not count as retained law, leaving us reliant on regulations that rapidly become obsolete—those relating to cars I know less about, but certainly in respect of those relating to clinical trials it would end our ability to participate. All such regulations are about not just anonymity but the way data are held. It will happen very quickly: if we are not on the same basis as the rest of Europe, our ability to be involved in those could end quite promptly. That is obviously important to patients, but also to researchers and, indeed, the pharmaceutical industry.

I wrote to the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, on 19 January and he replied very rapidly on 26 January. As we have heard today, he confirmed the Bill’s approach, which will bring over only regulations actually operative as we leave. That would exclude these clinical trial rules, for example, although we agreed them back in 2014. The letter that the noble Lord kindly wrote to me makes smoothing comments, if you like. It says, “Yes, we recognise the importance of close co-operation, we want UK patients to have access to innovative medicines, for which we need to be part of the same system, and we want the UK to be one of the best places to do science”. I turned over the page expecting the Lord Deben response, which would be to say what we are going to do about it. Unfortunately, at that point the letter stops. It says that we will discuss with the EU how to continue to co-operate in business trials but it fails to look at what will be needed, which is, I fear, a legislative process to make that happen.

[Lord Deben]

Will the noble Baroness be kind enough to make a distinction between these things? It seems to me that this is not a matter to discuss with the EU. The British Government could perfectly well say that where they have signed up to something already, they will in fact implement that. They could do this about regulations and directives if they wished to. They could do that in advance and would not have to say that they would have to discuss it with the European Union. That would help all of us and be an earnest of the Government’s good will.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I agree: the Committee will be pleased to know that, had the letter ended like that, I would not be on my feet today. These are important measures for our international co-operation, and if the Government would say, “Yes, this is something that we are willing to do”, that would take us forward. I hope that the noble and learned Lord may be able to give us that assurance as he responds.

Crown Dependencies

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Wednesday 19th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords—

Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Monday 12th January 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, the amendment is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Stevenson. I shall speak also to Amendment 35C in this group. Clause 36 empowers the Competition and Markets Authority to make and publish recommendations about the impact of any proposed legislation on competition. That is clearly to be welcomed. The CMA, after all, exists to promote competition in the interests of consumers and therefore, should laws be proposed that could be detrimental to consumers, we should know about it in advance.

Indeed, the Government recognise that regulation, procurement and other activities can affect markets and therefore envisage the CMA playing a key role in challenging the Government where they are creating barriers to competition. However, there is one problem with the clause. That arises from our failure, when the CMA was created, to persuade the Government to establish a CMA consumer panel analogous to those for the Legal Services Board, Ofcom and the Financial Conduct Authority, or some such similar mechanism, to ensure that real insight from consumer advocates and from the consumer perspective was built into the CMA’s judgment on such matters.

It is a matter of regret that we failed in that, given that the CMA’s primary duty under Section 25(3) of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which set it up, is to,

“seek to promote competition … for the benefit of consumers”.

It therefore seems essential that the voice of consumers be embedded in the CMA’s view as to whether draft legislation will be to the benefit or detriment of consumers with regard to competition.

Hence, Amendment 35B requires the CMA to undertake its consideration of draft legislation in consultation with consumer advocacy groups. Amendment 35C takes the Government’s new clause one stage further by requiring the CMA to undertake a similar exercise not simply when legislation is proposed but to carry out an annual health check on the state of competition and consumer protection in key markets, including by listening to consumers, consumer advocates and small businesses.

Without consumers at the heart of the Government’s drive to increase competition and tackle the cost of living crisis, any plans or measures are likely to be ineffective. Big business and special interests can always get the ear of Ministers, civil servants and regulators, and big businesses can and do—as we heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Deben—take advantage of market weaknesses.

We see this in the failure to pass on reductions in fuel prices and in the banks’ failure to work in clients’ interests. We see it in the bus market, where bus fares have risen by 25%—five times faster than wages. Big bus companies have cut crucial routes that people rely on to maximise their own profits. Indeed, the failure in competition within the bus market costs the taxpayer £305 million a year. We see it in myriad other markets where the consumer is unable to shop around—the monopolies and oligopolies, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in the earlier group. Indeed, if ever there was a failing market, it is where energy companies have not passed on reductions in wholesale costs to consumers. We have to have a mechanism for action to force such companies to cut their prices when wholesale costs fall, or where phone calls simply cannot get through to the right person, again as described earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. We have to have a mechanism for an annual review of vital markets to identify those where consumers are being taken for a ride.

For years consumers and their representatives knew that energy price cuts were not being passed on to users, but there seemed to be no mechanism for making the Government take action. Labour wants consumer groups, such as Which? and Citizens Advice, to work with the CMA and sector regulators to draw up an annual competition audit or health check of Britain’s economy, which will lead to a programme of action for regulators and the Government. We need this analysis to identify broken markets, so that Ministers and departments can respond accordingly.

Amendment 35C would ensure that the consumers are at the table when priorities for action are decided. Consumers and their advocates should not have to shout from outside. They should be given a direct say in how to tackle abuses or concentrations of power which undermine competition. Without this amendment, decisions as to whether markets are working in the interests of the public will be taken solely by regulators. These sadly have failed to protect small businesses in the banking sector when the mis-selling of interest rate swaps undermined some 40,000 small businesses. They failed retail clients when banks were selling PPI and endowment mortgages. Regulators have failed to ensure that users got a fair deal from the big six energy firms.

In all of those cases, consumers and their representatives were well aware of the serious problems with markets not working competitively, but they were denied a proper hearing. So our approach is to embed the consumer interest into decision-making, so that decisions about priorities for improving competition are taken in the public interest, in the interest of consumers and in the interests of small businesses, and with policymakers having to confront problems rather than leaving them to drag on. The proposed annual competition health check, led jointly by consumers and the competition authorities, would ensure that regulators and politicians act where markets are not working in the public interest. Crucially, it will include consumer organisations and small business representatives, rather than just being done by the CMA. I beg to move.

[Lord Deben]

I did not intend to speak on this but the noble Baroness has referred to me so often. I had better explain to her that I think that this is nonsense. It is nonsense from beginning to end because it misunderstands how business works and what the Government should do. The last thing we want is the establishment of a collection of people who professionalise the representation of consumers. Any of us who have ever had to deal with the double standards which some of them put forward about their own businesses and the way that they are never quite sure whether they are representing the consumer or some business operation which they have, which is part of the way in which they support themselves, recognise that this is not sensible. What is sensible is to have a proper organisation whose job is to ensure proper competition.

The Government ought to be concerned about having proper competition. I would be strongly opposed to the idea that the only people concerned with proper competition are the consumers. Government and the competition authorities should both be committed to ensuring competition. Decent companies, of course, can be very much in favour of competition until they see that there is an advantage if they are monopolistic. I do not blame them for that: it seems to me perfectly simple that everybody would like to have a nice, comfortable life in which they do not have to compete with anyone else. You therefore need a balance in society where you constantly refresh the market; you constantly make the market work. However, the idea that you do that by way of consumer representatives misses the point; we have to make government do it. That is what the Government are there for; it is not what Which? is there for. Which? is there precisely to be outside the system and to shout. Government is supposed to run the system so that there is proper competition. I do not want government to be excused from that.

Therefore, I do not agree with these amendments. I hope that the Minister will recommit the Government to ensuring proper competition. They should ensure, too, that the Competition Commission has the powers, the resources and the intent to achieve the best level of competition possible. We should also begin to have a bit more of the philosophical background to this, which is essential if we are to win the battle. If we cannot have competition as we ought to have it, frankly, the argument for the free society is difficult to maintain. If that is important, let us make it the purpose of government and the Competition Commission, and not say that it has to be run on a sort of old-fashioned, tripartite basis, which is to allow the Government to get off the hook. They should be on that hook firmly for promoting competition.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I am hoping to be seduced. There is a kernel to this that is more important than the detailed argument we have just heard. The kernel is that it might be more sensible to have a shorter period in which this whole thing operates. If I may say so to my noble friend, it is not a sensible argument to say, “It’s awfully inconvenient to do this because all sorts of other things might have to be reorganised”. I hope that the Minister will take seriously the following argument. We now have a system whereby we know when the next election and the election after that will be. If you think about it in those terms, you realise that no one is going to get anything much under way at this point just before Christmas. The real period will in any case be that from 1 January onwards. That is what is going to happen.

Given that there is so much unhappiness about this bit of the Bill and that so many people are concerned—I have checked my Twitter feed and seen how many people remain unconvinced by what the Government and the Minister are saying—it might be sensible to think about making a clear change, and saying to people, “Look, we have listened and we can see that there is still a concern about the weight upon organisations, and therefore we will at least think about the possibility of integrating into the Bill a shorter period”. That would of course mean that my noble friend’s concerns would have to be looked at. After all, this is the Committee stage. One of the things that you do in Committee is raise matters that do not actually fit at the time but might lead one to wonder whether there might be a little bit of a shift.

I was hoping perhaps not to be seduced but, in a gerundive sense, to be put in a state to be seduced. In other words, it would be helpful for the Minister to say that he will look at this and see if there is a possibility of giving confidence to people that their fears would be at least more limited.

The only other thing that I will say is that I am concerned about the immediate effect, because all the arguments about referenda and other things fitting at the same time create a very complex web. That is the second reason why I have difficulty with the views of my noble friend Lord Tyler, with whom I often agree—even though I am not supposed to. There is this difficult web in any case, and therefore it is not unreasonable to take apart the pieces and knit them together in a different manner.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I am not going to repeat the points that have been made, which in part arise from two issues. One is that there are so many bits in the Bill that change the way in which a number of organisations are going to have to work that a lot of them are concerned. The changes are also bureaucratic—and none of us likes that.

We have to place the other issue on the shoulders of the Government, I am afraid, because they brought the Bill in so late. We must remember that the Bill was introduced the day before the Commons rose for the Summer Recess, had its Second Reading on the day the Commons returned, and so on. That added to the feeling among organisations that there was such haste with the Bill that their views were not being heard. I fear that some of the questions that have been asked are still not getting answered

From the point of view of the organisations, how on earth are those that are affected going to get all their bureaucracy up and running before the regulated period? It starts in 23 weeks and two days’ time. In fact, it really starts at the beginning of April, because virtually every organisation’s financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March. Therefore, all their systems have to be up and running by then. That is adding to the concerns.

I remain worried that we are not going to see a number of workable proposals. We talked earlier about the ones relating to coalitions in Part 2 coming in good time. I know that the Minister was unable on Monday to promise that we would see the new government amendments on 7 January. It was for the sake of this House that we should have them, but of course it is the affected groups that will also need to see those amendments in order to even begin to work out how to respond in good time.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who is not in her place, said that Part 2 had to be reconstructed from the ground up. We know that that is what she wants and what the outside groups want. Failing that, perhaps the noble and learned Lord could explain what changes the Government will make to ensure that organisations can prepare for the regulated period well ahead of the due date.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I refer to my entry in the House of Lords register of interests. This gives me a good opportunity to ask one question of the Minister: has he noticed that this Part of the Bill refers to many things which were in the Financial Services Bill and that both are entirely different from everything else the Government are doing? In every other part of the Government’s actions we are reducing the amount of regulation. Much of the Bill is about that, but when we get on to the financial services arrangements, we are laying more and more emphasis upon more and more regulation and there is no indication, in my view, that it is going to be any better. It is really beginning to bug me that much of what has gone wrong was, of course, the fault of the financial services—I am not for one moment denying that—and certainly the fault of the banks, but I cannot honestly say that the regulator has come out of it with a great deal of praise. Indeed, a number of the things that went wrong can be laid directly at the door of the regulator. So the regulator then comes back and says, “Well, the only way to solve these problems is to have more regulation and more powers, so we can get it more wrong.”

My worry is simply that everywhere else in the Government’s programme, the Government have made the argument that if we have too heavy regulation, we do not have innovation, we do not have new things, we do not have new ideas and new mechanisms to meet the new circumstances of Britain, which after all is in competition with the rest of the world. That is the logic, that is the argument; an argument I buy into. The one area in which that is evidently not true is this one. So now we have had two Bills which interrelate and in this Part of the Bill, which is otherwise an admirable Bill, it has merely gone on doing what the Financial Services Bill had so wrongly done elsewhere. So we have an attitude to regulation which is entirely inconsistent.

We have just had two Bills going through the House of Lords and noble Lords may have noticed that the passage of the Civil Aviation Bill was entirely filled with speeches by Ministers about how wonderful it was that the public was now going to have a great deal more say and more appeal, and the regulators were not going to be able to ride roughshod over customers, businesses and the like. At exactly the same time, we introduced another Bill saying there are going to be no appeals, the public are not going to have a say, businesses are not going to have a say but instead we will have tougher and tougher regulations. I find this incomprehensible and as I have tried on several occasions to raise it in detail it would help me a great deal if the Minister would explain the rather curious mismatch.

Of course, the party opposite has not raised this very much because it wants more regulation in every circumstance: we know that. I raise it at this opportunity because I cannot do it on the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, but I think that in 10 years’ time—probably in five years’ time—people will look back at this period in Parliament and say, “What the blazes were they doing making the British financial industry less able to compete and less able to innovate, when they were doing so much good stuff in the whole of the rest of British industry?”.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I shall try to resist temptation. As to spectacles, of course it was the consumers who most wanted opticians not to be regulated. It has benefited us all because we have been able to buy much cheaper glasses than we used to.

I would like to ask the Minister, in the complete secrecy of this room, with only a few Hansard writers and television watchers present, that if his Government had not wanted a bonfire of the quangos, would this merger ever have gone ahead? Was it just another number in the bonfire of the quangos or did BIS always want this?

Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Monday 15th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

The assumption is—it has been said a number of times—“What if it is proved wrong?”. However, many, if not most, of these will be proved right, and that transparency surely will be of enormous benefit to consumers and investors in a way that I hope to demonstrate.

[Lord Deben]

Every time it is proved wrong it will undermine the proving of right. Since when have we had a system whereby one says, “Because many people are guilty but have not yet been proved guilty, we shall assume that they are guilty”? That is what will happen if you say it only on the word of the investigator and there is no concept even of a CPS.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

Perhaps the noble Lords will let me make my case and explain that. As was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Flight, the purpose of my amendment in the next group is to address this issue and I hope that it will get support from across the House. It is about a different way of dealing with this and bringing to that independence a much higher hurdle for exactly the reasons that noble Lords have been talking about. I hope that when we come to that amendment it will receive wide support because I share the view about a greater degree of independence and separateness being needed. Nevertheless, transparency is a particularly important issue which we, as consumer representatives, feel was very restricted by Section 348 of FiSMA and the FSA’s interpretation of this. I shall in a moment explain why we do not support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, in the present group.

Amendment 185B concerns warning notices in respect of procedures and referrals to tribunals and other issues. It would remove the requirement to consult with those about to be named before any warning notice is published. I find it hard to see why this requirement is in the Bill. It does not affect other walks of life. In criminal cases, ordinary people do not get consulted before they are arrested or charged but their names will be released. “Consultation”, I fear, is code for, “Let the lawyers loose”—I apologise to noble Lords who are lawyers—and risks injunctions, stalling and long legal arguments. Why should the person who is to be named be given special rights? If it is right to publish, why should there be a block on publication? I hope the Minister will be able to justify that, given that tremendous consultation goes on already with the firm involved before one is even at the stage of a warning notice.

On the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, as I say, we have sympathy with bits of them because of the lack of a second eye, independence and separateness, if you like, from the investigators within the regulation. The Bill empowers the regulators to publish the fact that a warning notice has been issued. This is of particular interest to the issue of misleading financial promotions. For consumers, it is a significant increase in transparency to know which ads have not only been looked at by the regulator but have been seen to be sufficiently misleading for consumers to know that an ad—which they may still have; they may have cut it out of a magazine or remember it from the television and it may still influence their purchase of a product—is under review. There could be considerable consumer detriment if the ad is still in their minds and they have not had a signal that the regulator is worried by it. That is one of the most important things to consumers.

At an earlier stage of the Bill, the Government were not motivated to accept our worries about reliance on “buyer beware”—caveat emptor—but how can consumers shop around if the ads on which they are basing their choice of products are perhaps going through what can be quite a lengthy procedure? It can take very many months, and an advertising campaign can be quite short, and all that time consumers do not know that procedures are taking place that might affect their choice of product.

In other areas, we know fairly quickly. If action is taken against a food factory suspected of contaminating food, we as consumers want to know immediately, and the Food Standards Agency lets us know straightaway when it is taking action. Similarly, if a garage had fixed a coach’s brakes and was accused of doing it less than satisfactorily—some of us are grandparents—I would not want my grandchild to be on a coach where the garage was already up before the Health and Safety Executive for not having done repair work properly. Similarly, as a shareholder, I would want to know whether BP did have some liability for pollution in the Gulf of Mexico before I parted with money to invest in that company.

There can be ongoing detriment if serious accusations are made and the people involved in parting with their money, as consumers or investors, do not know about it. I am not sure it was right that we heard nothing about LIBOR and the behaviour of banks until that first case was settled. Was it right that Equitable Life went on selling products even when there was a case pending? Many of the difficulties that arose were consequences of that ongoing sale. The first time these names came out there would be a lot of coverage in the press, but once we got over that hurdle—once we had got used to it and grown up—consumers are quite able to know the difference between an accusation and a finding. Keeping those hearings in the dark is quite against consumer interest.

We hope that the Government will not accept these amendments, but that in the next group they will be rather more sympathetic to a different approach to dealing with how these decisions are taken. For the moment, I hope that they can support my amendment but hold fire on the others.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I am extremely disappointed. We come back to “may” and “must”, which my noble friend mentioned. He has just had a birthday and he is still talking about “may” and “must”. If the FSA had not put on its website that it would not continue with this, perhaps our trust that it would continue with the RDC would be greater.

I confess that I have some form on this. In 1981, I worked on a Royal Commission on criminal procedure which tried to persuade the police that they should take their cases to an independent prosecutor. The Committee will not be surprised to hear that they did not want that to happen. In the Labour Party, it used to be the NEC that took cases against individuals. We were taken to court and told that we could not do that, so I ended up on the disciplinary committee to ensure that that was separate and independent of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. The barristers did not get it right and for a time the Bar Council used to use the same body to discipline its members and was taken to court. It had to set up the BSB complaints committee—that is another declaration of interest as my partner was vice chair or something of that—to ensure that there was that independence among the people who were presenting the cases and those hearing them. Whether there are two panels—one to see whether there is a case to answer and one to hold a hearing—is an issue of detail which I did not go into. I think that is for regulator. To trust the regulator, who is, if you like, the prosecutor—I do not like using the word “prosecutor” but perhaps we can bear it for the moment—to decide what sort of committee will challenge its evidence, seems to me not quite the correct way to approach this.

[Lord Deben]

One might go as far as that had it not been for two facts: one, to which the noble Baroness refers, is the website; and the other is the fact that a senior person, who is likely to be a regulator, said that his policy was to shoot first and ask questions later. That severely worries people. Whatever happened in the past, we need to remove doubt. As the Minister suggested that it does not really make any difference because he expects that to happen, I cannot see why it would make any difference if you were sure that would happen.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I could not have put it better, although I quite like to shoot first and ask questions after, but that is just a personal preference. As my noble friend Lord Barnett has said, there is clear support for this around the House. We are obviously going to bring it back at the next stage. If it is easier for the Minister, perhaps someone not from this side but from his side could put his or her name to the amendment. But for confidence in this type of independence it seems clear that the decision cannot be in the hands of the regulator who is also the presenter. There should be some guarantee that it is an independent body. I am extremely worried that someone who has been investigating could also be the decision-maker. That seems to go quite differently from other groups. So I am afraid we will return to this but for the moment I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, perhaps I may, on the second occasion on which I have addressed your Lordships’ House, start with a compliment on the procedures of this House compared with those of the House in which I sat for 35 years. I very much approve of the way in which this House deals with legislation and enables all its Members to play a proper part. That is why, when I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, introducing this matter, I had a wry smile, because at no time in the history of Parliament has there been such curtailment of speech, of discussion or of argument, than in the past 11 years in the other place. Very few Bills were ever discussed in their fullness and very few clauses were ever fully covered.

As a Member of Parliament, I found it increasingly difficult to explain to constituents that the reason why such-and-such a clause was so bad was because no one had discussed it. It had merely been pushed through. I found it difficult to hear the arguments put forward from that side of the House. But I agree with the noble Baroness that there is an important distinction, which I thought was most clearly put by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, between aim and means. Although I had to start by reminding the noble Baroness that no one on that side is in any position to talk about constitutional propriety after the experience of these years, there is an important point here which we must not forget.

It would be a pity if we missed the importance of the content of this Bill by not being able to come to an understanding about two mechanism issues that most of us see as important. One issue is to ensure that the simple method of affirmative resolution is given some substance, perhaps of a new kind, to enable proper discussion to take place and for a good deal of consultation to be gone through. It seems to me that that is not beyond the wit of those on the Front Bench to discern and put forward.

On the second issue, I take up the comment made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. If one goes through this list of bodies, one sees that most of them hang together but some of them clearly hang separately. If that is the case, there must be a mechanism for being able to say about those bodies that something different happened. Indeed, my noble friend mentioned that when he talked about Channel 4. If that is true, I hope we will not miss the importance of this Bill.

There has become a real feeling in Britain that the ordinary people of the country are subject to the almost whims of a large number of bodies that are unelected and very often rather curiously chosen. I have some sympathy with the noble Lord who asked about the east and west ends of Glasgow. It is true that many people in the list appear to be sequential offenders. Some people seem to have spent the past 20 years sitting on different quangos. I find it difficult to understand how the qualities of a single woman should make her suitable for the organisation that looks after consumer interests. To be a deputy head of the Financial Services Authority, to run the Food Standards Agency and now to run the Civil Aviation Authority, she must be a remarkable person, for the choice has been continuous for what appears to be 20 years. I am not sure that the public quite understand that and I am not sure that I quite understand it.

Secondly, one has to face the fact of the outrageous behaviour of some of these quangos. I mention to noble Lords on both sides of the House a letter I received from an organisation that, at the time, looked after the supervision of boarding schools—a task that has now been passed on to Ofsted, another quango. This particular one wrote to me enclosing a stamped addressed envelope in case I wished to say something secretly to it about the school at which my daughter was head girl. I wrote back and said that if I wished to say anything about the school I would go to the headmistress and say it to her; that if she did not satisfy me on the matter I had the privilege of being able to take my daughter away from the school—a privilege that is accorded to those who are lucky enough, or who choose, to pay for their children’s education; and that I had not asked that quango to look after the education of my children. I had specifically chosen not to do that. I then wrote to the headmistress to point out that I had asked her to look after the education of my daughter and that if she took any notice of what the quango said I would decide whether I wanted to remain a parent at that school because I had not chosen the quango.

I wanted that part of the quango to go, but it has not: rather, it was transferred to Ofsted, which said that it would carry out investigations at the same time as the voluntary investigations of the Independent Schools Council or the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference. Why is it doing it at all? Are we really saying that we have to have inspections of boarding schools when they have their own system and when the parents concerned are in a strong position to decide whether a particular school is properly run?

The Architects Registration Board is a body of no use and a great deal of interference. There is no reason why its responsibilities should not have been taken on by the RIBA—of which, I declare an interest, I am an honorary fellow—and for a special part of that to be made independent for the small number of architects who are not members of the RIBA. How have we left Natural England, with all its failings, in almost the same position as it was before? I have some problems about the substance of this because I do not think we have gone far enough.

However, there are some good things in the Bill that I would not like to lose. The suggestion that British Waterways should become a kind of third-sector body is extremely good and I hope that the Government will not destroy that by refusing to accept that the contract between it and the Government must be properly financed. I hope, too, that it will be able to overcome the reluctance of the Environment Agency to hand over its navigation role to British Waterways, where it is much more suitably placed.

Some independent non-governmental bodies ought to be seriously praised for the changes they have made, one of which is the Environment Agency. The noble Lord, Lord Smith, has done remarkably well in helping to show how a body that was increasingly thoroughly disliked in the countryside can be moved to one that is seen much more as an enabling body. Even given the tough line I take on this matter, none of us should ignore that fact.

The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to the Forestry Commission. I was a Minister responsible for the Forestry Commission, which was the most difficult organisation I have ever dealt with in trying to move it in the right direction. I was desperate to make it more concerned with the environment but it has moved terribly slowly over many years. I object to those who say that within a proper legislative package private people cannot be just as good as nationalised bodies in looking after the environment. Indeed, the best examples of environmental protection come from private people.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

Given his attack on Dame Deirdre Hutton, does the noble Lord accept that her advice when she chaired the Food Standards Agency was better than the Minister of Agriculture’s advice to his daughter about what she should eat?

[Lord Deben]

I rather purposefully did not mention the name of the person concerned as I did not want to make it personal. I merely suggested that she was a remarkable personage to have done so many things, and I made no comment about the advice that she gave in any of those circumstances, although, if I were choosing a head of the Food Standards Agency, I must say that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, was absolutely exemplary in the role.

On the Forestry Commission, I believe that much of the best conservation in this country is done by private people over private land which they care about because they want it to continue to exist and improve. Why can the noble Baroness not conceive of parts of the Forestry Commission being better run by different people instead of it all being run by the same people?