I thank the Minister for her comprehensive reply. I sometimes feel that she does not realise that we are trying to be helpful. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his comments on mystery shopper. If he can wait until Amendment 35V, we will probably have an interesting discussion on that as well.
I am encouraged by the Contracts Finder website. This service is currently available and has a huge number of suppliers with different costs and different costs supplied to it. The benefit of having a site championed by government would be the ability to have not just the front end, whether on a pc or other device, but what can be done with the back end to make sure there is some consistency. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Young, is a dab hand at technology, having just received an invitation from him to go on a technology visit somewhere. I hope that he has that in mind, and it is not just on the front end but the deeper work on the back end.
I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Deben; we have agreed on an awful lot during consideration of the Bill. What he said is exactly what our intentions have been throughout with these amendments. The genius of these amendments, if I may say so, was the attempt to try to create not just a process for measurement but a way in which to enforce a duty to consider carefully how the procurement process is designed. Having to report on the diversity of the people in that procurement process assists in the obligation to ensure that the tendering organisation designs a sensible process—one that meets the ability to report that it has gone through the right range of people and is appropriate to the needs of small business.
It sometimes feels rather as if being on the shadow ministerial team is like operating a small business. We have somewhat modest resources and I felt that our amendments were drafted with the finest legal advice that our sparse resources were able to get. I was disappointed to hear that the Government feel that these measures do not meet the test of equal treatment and I would be grateful if they could share with us the legal advice suggesting that. I would consider that another government action in support of small business.
I accept that there is a huge difficulty in all this. Again, I am trying to be very helpful here but the tone of some of the Minister’s response was a lot of after-the-event, post hoc assessments and rationalisation. We are trying to stop the situation being that within the process, it is just too far rigged against small businesses. I have experience of looking at public contracts in a variety of countries and, at times, we put in a series of information hurdles that are impossible to achieve. Occasionally in our processes, even on contracts, we have a “take it or leave it” approach—something that a big organisation can absorb as a risk, while a smaller business cannot.
I urge the Minister to consider carefully what we have tried to design. It is about telling people to have some consistency. Even our provisions about the mystery shopper are about creating a consistency in reporting and operating, and the establishment of a permanent mindset. We should not just design these procurement processes to be risk-averse and end up with the same old suppliers. We should make great effort to open them up as much as possible and design them for that purpose. If she will consider that we will be very grateful but, in the current circumstances, since we wish to be very helpful, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.