I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and my noble friend Lady Crawley for contributing to this debate. I did not know that I was meant to answer questions but, of course, I was not in the previous Labour Government. Had I been, I could give noble Lords a long list of things that they perhaps should have done—please do not report me to the boss for that.
I thank the Minister. She has not actually answered the question of whether this would be wrong. She said, “We don’t know; there is not enough information; we haven’t got research”. Actually, however, she had
no good answer. If two of us go to John Lewis and buy a kettle, one of us for a charity that we run which employs all of one person and three volunteers, and the other just for themselves, it does not help John Lewis for them to take their complaints in two different ways. John Lewis probably would not worry at all about there being the same form for both.
I was sorry that the Minister used the examples I had cited, the 2008 and 2012 consultations. Obviously, we can blame the 2008 consultation on the previous Government, but there is an issue in that this is about the big companies. We know that from responses to consultations. It is therefore important to remember that the Federation of Small Businesses has said that it supports this amendment. I would like to make that correction because the federation has asked me to do so, should the Minister refer to its research. It has said that, “This is not an accurate reflection of our conclusions. The report that we commissioned was to inform our policy”. So they were not actually the federation’s recommendations; they were recommendations made in an independent report. However, apparently where the report talks about “non core” area business such as purchasing energy supplies, there was a case for it being treated separately.
I would add only that all the help for small businesses is great, and I believe that on deregulation there is even more to come. But if the Federation of Small Businesses says that the best thing to help micro-businesses is this, it seems a little funny not to hear the federation on it.
I am grateful to the Minister for her comments and at this stage we will seek leave to withdraw the amendment, although I think that it is probably something to which we will want to return on Report.