My Lords, these amendments have been tabled simply to raise the issue. The Government may well have a different solution. They all relate to the incredibly detailed provisions in Schedule 8 for the procedures and time limits of how the CMA should carry out its business. We have nine pages of procedures set down in the schedule. I think it is a lawyer’s paradise and a regulator’s nightmare. These amendments suggest different ways in which we can simplify them, while at the same time remaining bomb-proofed to judicial review and so on.
Some of the problem stems simply from the amalgamation of the two bodies and having to preserve two stages of the investigation. Consequently, there will have to be ring-fences, Chinese walls and, for all I know, barbed wire and high hedges, but it does not need to be as complicated as this. Is setting it out in statute, in a complex and incomprehensible schedule, the best way to deal with it? My noble friend Lady Hayter mentioned the other day that it might be better to leave the board of the CMA to sort out in detail what the procedures should be, like most regulators and most organisations. The role of the board could be separated from the role of the investigators, as other regulators, such as the pensions’ regulator, do.
These amendments are tabled to give us a brief debate on the issue. They offer a number of alternatives. Amendment 24Q would make it clear that the board can set its own procedures, subject to the time limits. Amendments 25ZA, 25ZB and 25ZC would delete those paragraphs of Schedule 8 that relate to procedures and just leave the time limits. The Question that Schedule 8 stand part could delete the whole of that schedule and leave everything to the board. There are probably other options.
The Minister’s amendment was a tiny snip. We need wholesale pruning of this schedule, but it does not appear to be on offer. I seriously suggest that, if we leave it like this, the CMA will get caught up in procedural challenges and threats of judicial review. Every corporate lawyer in the land will be looking at this and ensuring that they follow every dot and comma of it. I think that the Government would be wiser to prune it and leave much more to the CMA board to sort out for itself. I beg to move.