My Lords, perhaps I may take this opportunity to thank the Minister for the way in which she has led this long and incredibly complex Bill over the past few months. She has been exemplary in offering meetings and has made sure that we have been fully briefed by officials, for which we are very grateful. Whenever debates have raised issues that she felt needed further consideration, she has written to us, thus carrying on a practice started by her predecessor; while he was pretty good at it, she has been exemplary and has won hands down in that race.
We said at the beginning of the Bill that we would like to work closely with her if we could because the Bill was in the right place in what it was trying to achieve and there were many things on which we could agree. Indeed, we felt that in some senses it could have gone further. I hope the Minister agrees that that has proved to be of considerable benefit to the process of getting the Bill to the position it is in now.
I want to make sure that recognition is duly paid to my team, my noble friends Lord Mendelsohn, Lord Mitchell, Lord Young, Lady Hayter and Lady Jones,
who have all had to appear at various times during the passage of the Bill because it covered so many different aspects of the Government’s work. We also had the innovation of having a Back-Bench liaison Peer, my noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie. As well as taking a particular interest in the PSC register, he also worked very hard to make sure that Back-Benchers were fully involved. That helped to stimulate the debates and get us through the work. We have also benefited from a very hard-working legislative assistant, Nicola Jayawickreme, our former apprentice in our office at the end of the corridor, who has grown in stature and confidence as this legislation has progressed. So apprenticeships do work.
Having spent a lot of time in areas that perhaps we did not expect to when the Bill was first introduced, and having become expert in the intricacies of how pub companies and pub tenancies work and the implications of various activities in that area, as well as lots more, let us say “Cheers” to this Bill as we wish it on its way.