My Lords, those of us who were privileged to participate in the Defra visit the other today—an opportunity that many of your Lordships took up—will have been very impressed to see the care and control and the deliberate and constant testing and assessment that Defra uses before enabling any biological controls to be used for some of these invasive species. Obviously, that is one direction that is under examination for Japanese knotweed, that much-hated plant, but it sits outside the scope of this legislation, which focuses very much on new invasive species that are not ordinarily resident and where there is a potential for eradication to succeed. The Bill has a narrower target, but other pieces of legislation sit alongside it that tackle, for example, invasive non-native species that are a threat to plant and animal health. So the Bill sits within a much broader context.
The amendments focus on the need for wider consultation on the code of practice. It has always been the Government’s intent to engage a great deal with expertise, with stakeholders and with others on the code of practice, which will be a substantial and complex document that will certainly need a great deal of thought and care. We continue to think about how we should carry out that engagement, and we would like to take a little more time to consider those issues, including the option of undertaking a full public consultation on the code. I can commit that I will have a response on the issue before Report, but I assure your Lordships that it is our intent to have that kind of intensive engagement, including with a number of parties that have been named today. We would like to take this away and think a little more on it, as the code of practice will be complex. However, it is indeed the Government’s wish to be able to tap into that expertise and thinking in order to make the code as effective as possible.
On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.