Compensation Bill [HL]

Once again, I find myself in complete agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in the spirit of what he seeks to do. As I have said during our previous discussions, for me, the issue is where best to address those questions. We may need to consider some of the key elements to make them a mandatory feature of the rules of the regulator. At present that is where I incline to put them. I will look at that carefully. There is no disagreement between us. I, too, confess that I am a BlackBerry user, but I try very hard not to become so addicted that I carry it with me. It is sitting at home at the moment, I am pleased to say, because I could not possibly have brought it into Committee and missed the opportunity of listening to the noble Lord by fiddling around with it. So I entirely recognise what the noble Lord said about the difficulty with e-mail, and I shall come on to that. However, I start with Amendment No. 94 and the whole issue of advertising. As the noble Lord rightly said, I have set in train a piece of work with the Advertising Standards Authority. The noble Lord will know that there is already legislation that covers misleading advertising and the ASA is recognised as the established means for implementing the Control of Misleading Advertisements Regulations. I am sure that we all agree that the ASA is the appropriate body to work with to see whether something more needs to be done. The research is ongoing. I hope that it will be finished in time for me to be able to say something further just before Report. The ambition is that the findings of the research will be presented to the code-owning bodies—the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice—for them to judge whether changes to the advertising codes are necessary or appropriate. I hope that that reassures the noble Lord that we are taking the matter seriously. The noble Lord asked previously about and raised today the whole question of Internet service providers.