My Lords, I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to this debate. We all broadly sung much the same tune. There are minor changes and I accept the point about the incidental and substantive issues and the need to be careful that we do not knock out the use of props in trying to find a better solution than the one that the Government are proposing.
I am afraid, though, that I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, by saying that I do not think that we got to the heart of the debate here. To be fobbed off with the idea that somehow by taking these rather extraordinary Henry VIII powers—probably on the wrong legal basis and almost certainly heading in the direction of a conclusion that almost no one else, given the same facts, would arrive at—and then to be told that we can return to this once we have experienced how the laws work does not seem to be a very satisfactory way of going about this.
This needs a bit more consideration and debate. As was said, many of the issues here are not party-political in the sense of opening up great divides between us. We all want a solution to this; I have said twice that I am not against the idea that in the medium to long term we should find a way of establishing a comparability of status for industrial designers and those in the other creative industries. On the other hand, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, life plus 70 years is a very long time. To change radically, in one short clause in a Bill that is largely about other things, from 25 years to life plus 70 is a big step. We are not saying, “Don’t do it”, but we are saying, “Let’s talk about this a bit more and try to get a better sense of what the issues are”. As someone said—I think that it was the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton—we are concerned about avoiding unintended consequences. There are some already, and we have picked up several of them in the examples that we have given today.
On wallpaper, I thought that hoping that the Hargreaves report would come to the rescue was a little limp. We are not talking about the sort of designs that might be found in commercially popular suppliers of cheap paper and products; we are talking about those people who have registered designs that they have utilised in a perfectly appropriate way in their business to obtain a suitable return on their investment for a number of years. That is changing from 25 years to life plus 70 where the registered design is in the ownership of the company. That is a very large step indeed.
I used that only as an example. I did not want the Minister to be defensive about it, but it made my point well. The approach that he has taken simply does not answer the question. I am sure that we will have to return to this but, in the interim, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.