My Lords, I want to intervene in a small way. I had a certain nostalgic feeling when reference was made to setting up a director-general of intellectual property because I was once the director-general of fair trading for some 16 years and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the fact that the legislation that applied to me directed everything in a sort of pyramid set-up, whereby I was at the top of the pyramid and everybody else was down below. That was rather enjoyable, but surely my noble friends who have put forward this amendment must realise that it is terribly dated now. In the 1970s and 1980s, as each old-fashioned nationalised industry became privatised, a director-general was set up—for example, of Ofgas, Offer or Ofcom. They were all set up as sort of clones of the director-general of fair trading with specialised functions. However, roughly from the 1990s, into this century, all these offices have been remodelled on what I might call more private enterprise bases, whereby there is a board, a chairman and a chief executive. The same person can no longer be both chairman and chief executive in either private enterprise or the public sector.
Bodies that have been set up in recent years to do a job of this sort, to act as offices to receive public concerns and complaints and to bring forward policy, have been set up in the more modern way. If I may put it in simple terms, previously there has been an “Office
of” something or other. Now there is the Financial Services Authority—or, rather, the Financial Conduct Authority—and the new competition body is not called the Office of Fair Trading or “Office of Competition” but the Competition and Markets Authority. It has a board, a chairman and chief executive. I am simply saying to my noble friends that I am not sure that I care for this amendment anyway, for the reasons given by my noble friend Lord Howarth, but it is technically not an up-to-date way of doing it.