My Lords, I very much regret to say that they have not been addressed. I am not going to press either amendment, but I want to say something about them because I want the Government to think a little further.
As regards the second set, I am afraid that the Government miss my point altogether. I invite the noble Lord and his officials to consider whether there is a way of ensuring that people who sign up to DPAs know what the consequences may be. I am not going to say anything more about that; it is an obvious point. The point that he made in response does not actually meet it; it meets a different point.
Let me go back to the first point. I detected three reasons why—and I was very disappointed by this—it said that it was inappropriate to accept either of the two amendments that I have put forward. One is the fear that if my amendments were accepted, the penalties would get out of line with what would happen in court. If that is saying any more than we want them to be the same, it is adding nothing to that. The parties will be in a position to know what the court would have imposed and can of course use that as a guidance without there being an obligation to fix at the same level.
Secondly, it said that there needs to be a benchmark. You have a benchmark by knowing what a court would do, and that could be a benchmark you can have in mind when you are negotiating. However, my second amendment would include that benchmark; I
do not understand why it is thought otherwise. The real point—the third reason which the noble Lord repeated several times—is that it is thought that it will be a soft option. I really would invite the Government to think again. This is not a soft option because what is being overlooked each time is that the range of things that can be achieved in a DPA are not just the financial penalty. You would not get on a conviction an order for compliance; you would not get on a conviction an order for a monitor; you would not get on a conviction an order to make a payment to charity. You might get compensation for victims, but that would probably not be as well as a huge fine, because the court would take into account the fact that there is a limited financial obligation overall that should be imposed on the defendant. So it is not a soft option, and I invite the Government to get out of that frame of thinking about it and maybe one or two other times today the same point has come about.
I urge the Government to think again because they are about to make DPAs unworkable and fail to achieve the objectives they set. I will withdraw the amendment this evening—I am not saying that I will not bring it back. However, I really would respectfully—I do not normally use that word here, but I mean it all the time—invite the Government to think again and to question their view about this amendment. We will see where we get to by Third Reading.