My Lords, my noble friend Lord Sikka has made a powerful case for greater transparency in regulatory matters. I think it is clear to everybody that nothing undermines confidence in the regulatory system so much as the sort of cases to which my noble friend referred. What is often evident is that these matters eventually come out, and so the traditional rule that the cover-up is worse than the original transgression exerts itself once again.
The Government have made a virtue of transparency and openness in several aspects of the regulatory system. Not least, for example, we have discussed in this Committee the case of beneficial ownership, and we heard the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, make the argument for transparency of the beneficial ownership record of Companies House as a great virtue at an earlier stage of our considerations. Surely that commitment to transparency should be quite general, covering all regulatory matters, and not limited just to selected parts of the regulatory system.