My Lords, there is a problem in what the Minister said. He talked about consultation and a call for input, but that is very passive. As I mentioned on an earlier group, unless you know that the Government are going to be looking at your profession, who would think to input at the beginning? On a later group we will come to the need to have a negotiating mandate, because at that stage that might stimulate people to think, “Oh gosh, that’s my profession.” If the Government would like architects, surveyors or whatever to be covered then they may start talking about it, but just putting out a call does not actually tickle the trout; people do not know that they should be involved. What the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said was interesting: people do not even know that the Bill exists, so the idea that they are following the situation and will keep looking at websites just in case their profession is affected is not going to happen.
There is an issue, not just about the Bill but about all sorts of measures, of the Government’s consultations consisting of, “We hope you’ll hear what we’re doing and will come and tell us about it.” The Minister has talked about the trade advisory groups. I am sorry to go on about this again, but there are no consumers on any of those groups. Again, the users of those professional services, be they clients of City lawyers or whoever, will not actually sit on those trade advisory groups so are not part of that inner circle that is kept close.
The Minister has basically said, “You can trust us. The Government wouldn’t bring forward regulations that affected the independence of regulators. We would never think to abolish a regulator.” The problem is that he was not in this House—quite a few of us who are here today were, including my noble friends Lord McAvoy and Lord Foulkes—when we had the Public Bodies Act. Do noble Lords remember that? It abolished 32 public bodies with a skeleton Bill and then by statutory instrument. The poor noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has to put up with me all the time because the National Consumer Council was abolished under that Bill; had it not been, I probably would not have had so much cause to be here because there would have been a statutory body on the formal list that the Government have to consult, and a lot of the stuff that I come in on at a very late date probably would have been dealt with before. So we have previously had a Bill on the basis of “Trust us, we won’t go round
abolishing things”, and now here we are: we have no National Consumer Council any more. There is history here that predates the Minister, and that is why we would like a little more evidence in the Bill.
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These principles have had clear support from everyone who has spoken. It is interesting to be accused by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and other noble Lords, of being too modest and to be told that I should have gone further than just this group. But take it from me, the amendment that we will bring back on Report will be much broader and will require prior publication of the draft regulations in good time.
I am slightly worried when things have to be hurried through. The noble Lord talked about setting up a process. If you had asked the regulator to set up a process, they would probably have done it, so you would not need the regulation. Where the regulator does not want to do this and a regulation has to be brought in in order to get them to do it, it is absolutely essential that there is plenty of time for consultation.
So I thank noble Lords for supporting the amendment. Obviously I give notice that it will be in broader form on Report. It might be better, however, if we could come to an arrangement so that there is a form of words that the Government can live with. If there is going to be consultation, there is no harm in having that in the Bill. It would be good if we could work together to make that happen, so that we do not have to divide the House. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.