My Lords, this has been an interesting debate, covering a wide range of issues previously discussed in Committee and on Report. I will not go through them in detail but I will say three important things. First, I welcome the Government’s movement on the matters raised in the Minister’s opening address on the OIM: its membership, the review within three to five years of the potential location of the OIM, and the firm commitment to ensuring that the DAs are consulted and their views fed in to this report. That was not as much as we wanted, but it is certainly a positive step forward that we welcome at this stage.
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The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, raised wider questions on devolution, but the noble and learned Lord made a more narrowly focused suggestion that I would like to press the Government on. The broader context raised by other speakers, in particular my noble friend Lord Liddle, gives a sense of the alarm bells that might be ringing on a number of issues raised by the Bill as a whole, but which come through narrowly in
the debate on this group of amendments. I hope that the Minister was listening hard to the powerful speeches he has heard this afternoon, that he will look carefully at the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and that he will respond appropriately when he can.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, thinks there is a way forward and was persuasive in that regard. The two sides are not very far apart, but we may be a little further apart on approaches to the execution of state aid. I do not think there is any debate about the need for the UK Government to set the overall framework within which state aid is operated. That has to be right, but the particularity of the current use of state aid—the way it is deployed and so on—has to be handled very sensitively.
A very good way of showing the Government’s commitment would be, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said, to accept his amendment on asking the common frameworks group to come forward with a proposal for state aid. As he pointed out, there is time. It is not a pressing issue, because we know now that we are operating on the basis of the WTO rules in the interim. If that works, why should we not take the time to go forward with this? Let us test the commitment, resolve and enthusiasm for the common frameworks through this good process of operating a common framework for state aid in short time, and to completion. If that can be done, and if the offer made by both the Scottish and Welsh Governments to hold back on any measures that might interfere with it in the intervening period is attractive, the Government have a win-win situation and I recommend it.