Public Bodies Bill [HL]

On the point about the thinking behind this, I note that a year before the Victims’ Commissioner took up her post the then Minister wrote to all the members of the advisory panel, whose terms were all coming to an end, asking them to stay on for an extra year until the commissioner was appointed. The panel members agreed to work on until May 2010, which suggests that even the previous Administration might have thought that the arrival of the Victims’ Commissioner would call into question the future of the panel. That relates to the question that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, asked me earlier about whether the panel had already been abolished. There was this hiatus because the previous Administration had not appointed a new panel. I suspect that it was thought somewhere that there would be an overlap between the Victims’ Commissioner and the work of the advisory panel.