Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

My Lords, I fear that I am going to miss the dulcet tones of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on the rest of the Bill. I have sat through this paean of praise for the pubcos at Second Reading, in Committee and so far during the proceedings in your Lordships’ House today. I have some sympathy with the noble Lord’s view about the events of the late 1980s; it is a pity that he was not around in the other place when a Conservative Government were insisting that the power of the brewers at that time should be curbed. He obviously feels that the outcomes of that legislation, such as the beer orders that followed, have led to the situation in which we find ourselves now. Yet the contradiction appears to be that, while it is fair to say that he deplored the effects of the beer orders and what took place—the sell-off of the pubs and the relinquishing of the tie between the brewers and pubs has led to the pubcos that we have today—he has spent every stage of this Bill defending those same pubcos. He cannot really have it both ways; if the beer orders and their aftermath were so bad in the 1980s in creating these organisations, I wonder why he has spent so much time defending them during the passage of this legislation.