I am assured that we had one of those, so I cannot even blame this Government. But we do have a Better Regulation Task Force, so if there is no list of regulators at the moment, what on earth has that task force been doing in all the time that it existed under a Labour Government and for the 11 years that it has existed under a Conservative Government? That is exactly the sort of job it should be doing.
If we really need a list of regulators, so that young people can know whether to go to an apprenticeship or get their articles—that is what they used to be called, but I do not think they do those any more; the noble Lord, Lord Palmer would remember—I would understand
that. But that is not what this Bill is about. It is about giving powers to a Minister to say to a regulator: “You will do something to accept people coming from another country to use the qualifications they have obtained”—whether by apprenticeship or by degree, or by sitting next to Harry or whatever—“to come here”, either because we have a skills shortage or because we are signing a deal with Australia, or wherever. That is what the Bill is about. It is not about helping our sixth-formers know where to get a job.
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The problem is that if the Minister says that he needs to know to whom this Bill applies, so does everyone else. The regulators need to know and the professions need to know. If he cannot answer, and if his department, after all the weeks working on this, cannot answer, then relying on the idea that two gentlemen—there might be a lady, but I think there are two men in the assistance centre at the moment—are going to be able to define whether a profession or a regulator are covered shows that we are really in a very sorry position. The Minister’s answer makes the idea of a schedule even more important—he can have a definition as well, if he wants—so that the matter is clear. I only ask him to agree to go away and think about what we said about that.
The specific question I want to ask the Minister is this. He said that his colleagues have now contacted, or been in touch with, all the new regulators whose names appeared in the new list. Perhaps he could feed back to us, either in a letter or in some other way, what the responses were from those regulators—who were contacted only late in the day—and whether they were content to be there. I really urge him to think very hard about putting a very powerful Bill on the statute book without even his advisers, let alone us, knowing who is covered.