My Lords, perhaps it would help the House if the character from Hogwarts actually explained what was going on in our minds when we made the recommendation. I shall quote a sentence from the report:
“In making this change, we believe it would be sensible for local authorities to be allowed to charge interest to recover their costs, to make the scheme cost neutral”.
We were not trying to second-guess how many applicants there would be, but it would be sensible to set up a scheme that worked in a way which did not actually cause a charge to be made on the Exchequer for the running of the scheme.