My Lords, I have huge respect for the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him when he was a Minister in Defra. I admire his tenacity as far as the Agricultural Wages Board is concerned. I do not want to rehearse the arguments we went over when discussing this issue a couple of weeks ago but I will comment on the proposed amendment. I declare an interest as a farmer in Northumberland but I am not a landowner. I also chair the Better Regulation Executive.
I want to deal with the process of the impact assessment. The Regulatory Policy Committee, the RPC, scrutinises all impact assessments as submitted and scrutinised this one. It is required to present the range of possible outcomes as a consequence of a decision such as this—I commented on this during my speech in Committee. It has to look at the worst-case scenario, which is that over time wages fall to the national minimum wage. The point I made in the debate was that that is absolutely unlikely to happen because of the demand there is for agricultural workers. The differential in wages that exists now, as referred to earlier, will continue and may widen because once you remove the Agricultural Wages Board the market will itself respond. In my view, farm employees will then be even better off.