Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I gently suggest to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, that it does not work like that. In previous times, I was responsible for a couple of boards in the disability field—the DLA board and the industrial injuries board. I did not appoint members on behalf of the Secretary of State; I did not read their CVs and decide which one I wanted. It never worked like that. Despite the suggestions of the noble Baroness, those appointments, quite rightly, went through the public appointments system. Under that system, a civil servant, possibly a medic in a case such as this and someone from the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments would adjudicate on a number of interviews. If there was, say, a short list of three people, they would give a point score and an assessment and the Minister would be expected to accept the person with the top point score. If you wished to deviate from that in any way you had to have very good reasons for doing so, in which case issues such as gender balance, regional balance or other criteria which were not in the original job description could be brought into account, and the Secretary of State would then tick it off. That is how it is done. All this vocabulary about it being cosy or needing independence does not bear any relationship to what actually happens.