My Lords, I shall be brief in moving this amendment. It is partly probing and partly serious, and in due course I shall probably reserve the right to come back to it on Report.
I referred to the idea for the amendment in my Second Reading speech at col. 712 of Hansard on 8 September. I accept of course that the two bodies, the Trade Remedies Authority and the Food Standards Agency, do not have the same legal status. The Food Standards Agency is a non-ministerial government department whose staff are civil servants, and indeed its board would make such a decision as implied in the amendment. It is the principle that I seek to transfer, which has worked quite successfully in the legislation for the Food Standards Agency for over 20 years, under Governments of all parties—in other words, the principle of transparency and openness when dealing with what can sometimes be confidential matters.
The power is there, as I say in my explanatory statement, to be a further guarantee to reinforce the operational independence of the authority. No one is ever going to believe that any of these bodies—set up at the behest of Ministers and perhaps fulfilled without proper due process, in the way that all bodies should be—are actually operationally independent. The one way to ensure that is to give the body such a power. I fully accept that that is very unusual—government departments, in the main, do not understand how the Food Standards Agency legislation came to provide such a power—but it was freely given by the Government and accepted by Parliament in the 1999 legislation. To the best of my knowledge, it has not actually been used, in the sense of being a sanction.
I referred at Second Reading to a stench of corruption about this Government—not as individuals, but there is a general feeling that something is not quite right about the way things are being done. Any wayward move on a trade deal—that is the polite term—could be avoided if those who wanted to be a little wayward knew that the TRA had such a power. That is where the idea of a sanction comes in: it would be established in primary legislation, even though I suspect, and sincerely hope, it would never be used. Then, we could better trust the trade deals, which is the important, central point. I beg to move.