My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Hayter for her intervention. As always, she has been able to encapsulate this issue with
the use of some very vivid and impressive examples and I pay tribute to her strong advocacy for small businesses and consumer rights.
I will start by saying a couple of words on what the Minister said on the substance of the amendments, and then I will turn to the other matters. I listened very carefully to what she said. I think that there is a limited issue on costs versus benefits in relation to this. The costs at the moment are heavy burdens on micro-businesses and I think that the cost-benefit analysis of this is quite limited. I am less concerned about some of the unintended consequences that she suggests because some of them are already the sort of things covered in the two Acts that she forced me to look at after Committee. I am not sure I enjoyed reading them but I did look at them to try and get better sense of what is contained in the Sale of Goods Act and the Supply of Goods and Services Act and how they operate. A lot of the issues which she raises are already covered there. In addition, the nature of the contractual relationships is clearly covered in the other Acts and is outside that. I know that she is extremely accomplished in her task, and that she does not just take the legal advice that comes from the department without scrutiny. There is an issue here about some of the caution always inherent in some of that legal advice.
Nevertheless, I thank the Minister for a very constructive suggestion and an excellent way forward, which we on this side strongly agree with and for which we are very grateful to her for suggesting. Outside this, I might try to persuade her perhaps to add a little money for a bit of research on the cost-benefit analysis—that will not be too hard a task. However, with appreciation for a very constructive response to our amendment, I beg leave to withdraw it.