My Lords, we have a few amendments in this group and I will speak to just a couple of them. Two of them deal with matters to do with the Regulatory Reform Committee, which I think will be dealt with by the Minister when he comes to respond. The amendments would simply implement the proposals that have not already been dealt with by the previous discussions.
Amendment 19 is a probing amendment. In this set of amendments we deal with the third leg of a three-legged stool that tries to address a set of arrangements around the failure to commit to a financing model for small businesses at the individual level. This is a different attack on the same problem we have talked about throughout the whole of this afternoon: why finance does not flow as well as we would all like to this sector of our economy. The amendment is designed to suggest to the Government that there would be merit if one could extract some lessons from the process, whether or not it also includes the proposals just spoken to. That would add another dimension. We will see how the Government respond to that.
In the context of there being a small business in need of financing, a set of traditional lenders to whom it may or may not have applied, alternative suppliers and others who have expertise and knowledge about that, it would make sense for there to be some lessons learnt from these processes. The suggestion is made in the amendment that the Government might wish to think about providing an annual report to Parliament so that we have a sense of how these things operate. This is to some extent uncharted territory. It may feel like another administrative burden. In some senses, being a probing amendment, the wording is not to be taken at face value. However, this is interesting and new ground. We need to learn the lessons from it and to get the information that we gather out to as wide a group as possible. I hope the sensibility of that would commend it to the Government in some way. I look forward to a response on that.
The converse side of this argument is to be found in Amendment 21. This was slightly touched upon by the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, who I am afraid is not now in her place. I recognised what she said in her intervention on the last group. We would all be worse off if the credit referencing agencies and those others involved in this stool of three legs that I have talked about were fed information that was wrong. There has to be some means or mechanism for those who feel that the information held on them in these agencies is correctable. The noble Baroness was right to say that this has a sense of the googlisation issue, where you might have the right to correct your own information if you do not like it, but that is not where we are here. We are saying that if it is factually incorrect or in some senses paints a distorted picture, there ought to be some redress mechanism.
There are probably already reasonable direct relationships that could be invoked for that. Of course, there is the Financial Ombudsman Service, which plays a great part in dealing with many issues. I suspect that the people we are talking about in the SMEs, particularly the smaller ones, would find it helpful to have a body like the FOS to which they could pray in aid for help to correct information, question whether information held is correct and iron out any problems. The amendment is there as a suggestion, to the extent that there may even be other systems that would be better able to take this on. If there are not, why should the FOS not be invited to do so? The reason for tabling the amendment was that, in researching this, it turned out that there is a rather low limit for the size of institution that can approach the FOS. It would perhaps be helpful if, as a result of this discussion, the Treasury took this back and looked at it again. It seems wrong to cut off an area that is clearly effective in trying to get things resolved and to get the economy moving and things going. I hope that that is a helpful contribution.