My Lords, I wanted to build for one moment on what my noble friend Lord Jenkin has said and take it to a further degree. This House should be very careful about restricting a body that we have been careful to construct. There is a terrible habit in your Lordships’ House, of which there was a good example today when somebody got up and said to the Minister, “What are you doing about Egypt?”—as if we were doing anything about Egypt, or as if we should always do something about everything. It is about time that we realised that there are a lot of things in this world that we are not likely to do anything about at all. One thing that we should not do is to do things about things about which we cannot at this moment know anything whatever.
We have no idea how this organisation will develop. We have some suggestions, which my noble friend Lord Jenkin has put forward, which may represent some of the routes. But here is the idea that we should be so frightened that we should write down now what this organisation may or may not do, when it has been carefully built, with a whole lot of non-executive directors and all sorts of restrictions as to the nature of the people who run it. I find that one of the problems of government. I would prefer the organisation to be in the position of doing rather too much or doing something wrong than not being able to do what it needed to do, or what came to it, or to take up opportunities that might arise. We have to be a bit freer on this. There is a kind of determination to control that we should resist. I would much prefer this organisation to be sensibly built and then left to get on with it. So I hope that we resist any suggestion that, at this moment, we should decide what this organisation should do in two or three years’ time, or indeed in five or six or 10 or 11 years. It is much better to leave it as it is, and I hope that my noble friend will resist any such proposal.
5.30 pm