My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow that speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Blake. I was reassured by some of things she said about how the Nolan principles are being applied at the local level—that that is her experience is reassuring. Of course, it brings this Bill into focus again.
To some extent the amendment is idealistic, but look at it the other way round. What is the converse of this amendment? It is that we allow a Bill to go through that will be subjected to huge political manipulation and little transparency. We have already seen that the Government are not averse to using political direction to spend literally billions of pounds. I ask the Minister to put himself in the boots of the Opposition, because the Bill that he is creating is one that future Governments will have to use. If the Minister, if he were listening, were to put himself—