My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. Before talking about the amendments specifically, I want to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. I support his point, but the ski instructors of Great Britain are not alone in having their route to working in the EU cut off. We should look at the overall economic impact of this. Research by Make UK, which represents the UK’s manufacturing industry, shows that 61% of manufacturers regularly send their employees to the EU to follow up their manufacturing
work with service work. Almost all of those have qualifications that until now have been recognised in the EU, but that is no longer the case. So this is a huge economic issue, not just for ski instructors and their families but for the entire manufacturing and indeed service sector of this country. The noble Lord has hit on a point, but it is actually a much bigger point overall.
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The Minister is in danger of establishing a tradition. We are sitting down to our Sunday lunch—whether it is a well-regulated piece of pork or an unregulated leg of lamb we do not know—when one of his letters arrives. This letter was timely, but only because the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayter and Lady Noakes, insisted that we have it. It is quite clear that the Government’s intent was that we should go all the way through the Bill without knowing the contents of this list. It is also quite clear now that the department and the Government are going all the way through the Bill without knowing the content because, as was so elegantly pointed out by Members of the Committee on all Benches, this is what might best be described as a work in progress.
That brings up another point touched on by my noble friend Lord Purvis, which is, if the department is having problems simply drawing up a list of which professions are included, how is it going to manage a process of demand management? It does not even know who the people are. For example, we have notaries here, so perhaps the Minister can explain how demand management of notaries might be achieved. Is it how long you wait, or how many there are? Is there a quota per town of notaries? I do not know. Then we have banner-towing pilots. How do we know when we have a shortage? Are there too few banners?