My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Stevenson for raising what I think the Committee will agree is a very important issue. Intellectual property law is infernally complex and difficult. It is labyrinthine, as my noble friend remarked a little earlier this afternoon. For the businesses that the Government rightly seek to assist through this legislation, there are real difficulties in understanding the law.
It is of course a long-standing principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse. However, the department will of course want to facilitate a good understanding of the law. It would be helpful if the noble Viscount would unfold his thinking to us about how this is actually to happen. Does the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills have the address of every business in this country, including sole traders and the myriad little businesses that come and go, perhaps entering different incarnations, which are very hard for anybody to trace? Of course he does not. Perhaps he expects them to have recourse to the websites of the business department and the IPO: is it envisaged that those websites should provide an encyclopaedic account of intellectual property law? I imagine it is not, although I am sure that the IPO, not least through the opinion service that this Bill legislates for, will always do its best to help people to understand the law as it may apply in their circumstances, and to know what opportunities the law creates for them.
My noble friend referred to the design professions and their representatives. However, I do not think anybody can be confident that the design professions necessarily represent perfectly everybody who practises in the relevant fields. Hard-pressed business people operating from day to day will often find it pretty difficult to know the rules of these very complex games. This debate is useful because government ought always to reflect on the practical impact of their legislation on those whose lives and businesses it will affect. As I noticed and readily acknowledge, the purpose here is to give assistance to business. However, the task of enabling small traders to steer their way through this labyrinth, small and medium-sized enterprises in particular, is massive. I am grateful to my noble friend for tabling this amendment and look forward very much to the Minister telling us a bit more about how the Government see this working in practice.