Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for allowing me to come back to her in writing on the question of budgets. There was one point on which I was not as clear as I ought to have been. I was reminded of something that my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece said. I said repeatedly that the commission had “A” status under the current arrangements. As has been made evident in the debate, clearly there were problems in the past in the way in which the commission related to the Government Equalities Office. The relationship did not work as well as it needed to. However, what I sought to say on behalf of the Government was that the relationship had improved and continues to improve. We are in danger of shooting ourselves in the foot. We have “A” status under the current arrangements. We are improving what is wrong. We will continue to improve and put things right, so let us not put ourselves in a situation where we improve everything and then the ICC turns around and says, “We will remove your ‘A’ status because you keep telling us that the arrangements do not work”, when we have been able to show that recently they have started to improve and that we know how to improve them further—which is what we will do.