Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall join in briefly, even though I am far from being an expert on this commission like my noble friend Lord Greaves and, from what he has just said, the noble Lord, Lord Knight. What I do have is some 18 years’ ministerial experience, man and boy, continuously from 1979 to 1997, at every level of government, including several years as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary, before becoming what was, in terms of nomenclature, rather more grand. In that, I share some experience with my noble friend on the Front Bench: we overlapped each other at the old DHSS, or was it by then the DSS? It might have had yet another title: they change more or less every week. I want to contribute a priori from that, picking up a couple of the points that have been made. First, I just do not understand the general arguments that are being put forward for the proposition in the real world, as distinct from some hypothetical world. It is said that there should be greater direct accountability by Ministers within the department and that the department should be the champion. We all know that if the Ministry of Justice decides to abolish magistrates’ courts, another department cannot act as the champion for anything. We all know that what happens is that, by and large, these matters are settled at meetings of relatively junior Ministers, where you may or may not carry the day, but you cannot then go round outside that Cabinet committee saying, ““I championed this but the rest would not agree””. You cannot say, ““We lost on this, but we will now campaign to have it reversed or to make people think again””. Equally, when I was such a junior Minister faced with those difficulties, I welcomed having an authoritative external body to which I could point as a support for what I wanted to get my colleagues to agree to. Far more convincing than saying, ““My unit in the department tells me that this is what we want””, is to say, ““We have this great and good body of external people who really know what they are talking about and who have done some research, and this is what they are advocating””. Some of this thinking does not connect with the real world. I would be most grateful if my noble friend would comment, if he feels able. The only other thing that I would say is that I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, will not press his amendment, because I think we could have a much more productive argument when Ministers have had a chance to think about just what it is that they want to do.