Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, in the course of many debates on the Bill, the question has repeatedly been raised, ““If such-and-such a body is abolished, what is going to replace it? Who will do the tasks that the abolished body has performed?””. That is a very significant question in regard to this amendment, appropriately put forward by my noble friend Lady Hayter, because although the Government have thrown out a few of what I might call titbits of information—that Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland will give a certain amount of advice and will be better resourced than they are at the moment, struggling though the Government are for resources on all sorts of matters—the Government have also indicated that, so far as enforcement of the law is concerned, where retailers or others have contravened pieces of legislation, the trading standards officers employed by local authorities are to do the job of helping the consumer. Even if one accepts that to a degree and ignores the consumer work of the Office of Fair Trading—as noble Lords know, I have declared an interest as a past head, or director-general, of that body—there is still the huge problem that the National Consumer Council has over the years produced a great deal of research, many studies and publications which have informed the Government, informed the Office of Fair Trading and informed the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, as it now is. What is the substitute for that going to be if the National Consumer Council is abolished? This week I noticed, because I got a large envelope in my post, that in the closely related field of competition policy the Government have worked out what is going to happen—in, at the moment, 100-plus pages of information. At the moment it is a Green Paper, next it will be a White Paper and then there will be legislation. There is a great deal of detail on matters that we might come to shortly on Report. We are to have a merger of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission. They are to constitute a competition and markets authority, and a whole lot of the Government’s Green Paper is taken up with how that is to be governed, what the governance is, how it is to work, various matters relating to antitrust merger policy and so on. That is the sort of consultation detail—admittedly, the Government have not yet had the results of that consultation—that we in this House and the other place should have been given before the Public Bodies Bill was put forward listing whole hosts of bodies to be abolished without any explanation about any of them, except for a few titbits, as I have called them, of responses in this House and elsewhere by government Ministers about their reasons. We in this House are still very uncertain, even at the Report stage of the Bill, about why some of these bodies are to be abolished or merged or to have their functions transferred according to various schedules. Thank goodness that the Government have given way on Schedule 7 and withdrawn it; at least we do not have that huge pending tray of bodies that could possibly be abolished. Still, there is great uncertainty and, if she does not mind my saying so, I am sure that my noble friend Lady Hayter will agree that although the Government have said some things about this, they still have to do a lot of homework on what is to replace the work of the National Consumer Council. The work of that body has been splendid. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, was a distinguished chairman. Another distinguished former chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, is sitting in her place. I am glad to say that the chairmen of the National Consumer Council, while always eminent and excellent people, were not necessarily Conservatives; Lord Young of Dartington, my noble friend Lord Whitty and others have been chairmen as well. A combination of political expertise and experience has been brought to bear on a body that has given advice over the years since it was set up in 1975, which is quite a long period now. Many Governments have benefited from that body. What is to replace it? Have the Government given a complete answer to that? I would be very glad if the Minister could say a little more on this amendment.