I thank the Minister for responding to my amendment and speaking to Amendment 42, which I did not move; I am grateful to him for responding to something I did not say.
As he explained, the point of Amendment 42 was to include ARIA as subject to public contract regulations. I do not understand why it is not. These debates are all connected. We are constantly trying to push the
Government to give us a bit more transparency and give ARIA more accountability, but they keep pushing us back. The Minister says that he wants a culture of transparency, but I do not see how that will come about as we are currently progressing.
As my noble friend Lord Browne said, ARIA is not unique and, as several noble Lords have said, it needs protecting from reputational damage. I make a plea to the Government not to allow ARIA to end up being called some sort of secret research agency, which is a real danger. When that kind of pressure starts, this agency will not stand a chance. Never mind the measures in the Bill about protecting it from being disbanded for 10 years; they will count for nothing. It would be very easy for a Secretary of State to get rid of this agency should the political pressure mount. That is what we are trying to avoid here.
The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, talked about the exemptions from FoI, which I hope reassures other noble Lords who talked about commercial interests and national security. Of course we would not want FoI to be used in a way that would harm ARIA, but that is already taken care of by the exemptions from FoI that already exist.
The Minister tried to say, “I don’t know why you’re so fussy about FoI. It never really tells us anything we wouldn’t already know.” I just had a quick look at what has been out in the past few weeks thanks to FoI. FoI revealed that 52% of councils spent nothing on electric vehicle charging, and the scale of data breaches at local authorities. FoI told us about the funding drop in early years in different regions of the country over the past quarter and about the number of operations cancelled by trusts. These are all things that we would not have been able to discover, except perhaps by a Parliamentary Question, if FoI were not available. It is important. It provides something that is unavailable by any other mechanism. Given the failure of the Government to take us up on any of our other suggestions for transparency, I am pretty confident that, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said, we will return to this and push the Government hard on this issue at Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.