My Lords, that was a powerful exchange all round. Clearly, this is an issue of great interest and concern to your Lordships. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, who, among other things, welcomed the fact that the Government have already made a number of concessions along the way—that needs to be on the record. However, she pointed out that there are considerable costs involved for the trading standards service because there is a lot of bureaucracy involved in sending out 7,000 notices of intention to inspect each year, and the correspondence that has to go back and forth on all that. This is not a cost-free new regulation.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for calling into question whether there was a problem here that needed to be solved at all. He pointed out that this measure is bound to lead to endless litigation if we are not careful and made the important point that the
ability of trading standards officers to make unannounced visits is, in itself, a deterrent, and it is uncertain what the world would look like if that deterrent effect was removed.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for raising key questions. She asked what would be the benefit of this measure to consumers and whether they would really benefit from it. She made the important point that an awful lot of unannounced visits follow anonymous tip-offs. Other traders know what is going on down the road. They do not want to get into a fight over it but want trading standards to know about it. However, there is a difficulty with that information being used later in a court of law since it is important but confidential information. I can see that that may cause a problem in future.
The Minister provided reassurance under a whole series of headings, which was extremely helpful. We have made some progress on these issues tonight. She paid tribute to trading standards officers, which I welcome, and emphasised continuously that this is about routine inspections only and that the legislation is generously drafted. We are reassured that suspicion is good enough in these cases. If a suspicion of a breach in the law is enough to trigger a perfectly legitimate unannounced visit, that covers an awful lot of cases. However, it leaves unanswered whether it is really worth putting on statute this new regulation and the binding condition on trading standards officers if they are to be able to bypass it in an awful lot of circumstances.
To conclude, we have a lot of new and extra reassurance on the record from tonight which is more than helpful. Putting this in the Bill also seems rather heavy-handed when we know there will be guidance in any case following the legislation. Guidance not statute sounds rather less of a sledgehammer to crack the remaining nut after we have heard about the many exemptions and exceptions. With those words, and the thought that we might need to bring this back again, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.