My Lords, perhaps I may add to what my noble friend Lord Peston has said. I will not repeat the may/must argument; it has been well enough made, and I hope that we will get a reply from the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon. Incidentally, in congratulating my noble friend Lord Mitchell, perhaps it is right that I should also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon. This may be our last exchange before he retires.
The noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, mentioned the assumption that the FCA will now have the powers to deal with these unscrupulous people regarding payday loan schemes. As my noble friend Lord Mitchell said, they will have lots of good lawyers because when people have many profits to defend, as they do, they
tend to use lots of lawyers. While I am not a lawyer, I hope that the noble Lord’s lawyers have indeed drafted this correctly. I know that these things can never be done tightly enough and that once lawyers get involved it finishes up in the courts for somebody else to decide. That is bound to happen and I am not blaming the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, or his legal advisers for it. In my experience, when court actions involve lawyers on two sides in major cases, both advise their clients that they are right and that they should go to court about it. That becomes very expensive and they eventually resolve it only in the court.
As the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, said, although he is confident about this provision, it is nevertheless not a silver bullet. Does he think that the advice he has been given will result over the next few months or weeks in the lawyers worrying about it? At the end of the day, will we require secondary legislation to deal with this? I hope not—I hope that the lawyers have it absolutely right this time. However, as the noble Lord said, one of the worries is the law of unintended consequences.
This is such a complex area but I like the point that my noble friend Lord Mitchell made about what happens in, I think, Canada.