Public Bodies Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend is obviously correct. I intend to make some progress now, but I will come to precisely that point in a little while. We would have saved £500 million by 2012-13 as a result of planned and properly costed change and reform. We also accepted that there is scope for further reform. We agree that the Railway Heritage Committee should be reformed and that the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts should enter the voluntary sector. We also support the reform of a number of other significant bodies. The problem is not with reform, nor is it with the tests that the Minister has set for that reform, as I will set out in a moment; the problem is with his ill-thought out and rushed through Bill. There has been confusion about what the Minister's motives are. First he told us this week that the Bill was about, as he put it, ““sound money””; later we were told that it was about underpinning good government. However, whether the issue is money or good government, the Government's proposals in this Bill are certainly not the answer. The Government are asking the House to agree to the abolition of important bodies such as those raised by my hon. Friends in interventions—they include Consumer Focus, the Commission for Rural Communities and the Football Licensing Authority—but the right hon. Gentleman cannot yet tell us what he will put in their place. He has also claimed £30 billion in savings when the reality is that the Government will save £1.6 billion—or less, when redundancies have been paid for.