I want to express a concern. Although the Minister’s argument seems to be that the powers are already rather limited and that there are natural limitations—for example, the GPA—I am not convinced that we actually need to put all this into delegated legislation. In some places, we could decide things and make it clear in the Bill. Then, if there is future evolution of the market or the development of technical regimes, as my noble friend suggests, we should come back to the House and look again at legislation in those areas.
Obviously, I come from a business background, and, as I said, the thought that officials can effectively make major changes that will affect the market in which you are operating is actually quite worrying. We had an example of this on Monday. The example we received from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, about
“a tool to cover imperfect policy development”
was a quote from the report in relation to private utilities. Therefore, I did not repeat it, but it is a good example of where there might be a changing market, which might then generate quite substantial uncertainty in the procurement field and be a big problem for our companies.
I took four egregious examples out of a respected cross-party report to try to be constructive, but my noble friend has unfortunately tried to explain why the Bill is as it is, rather than to respond to these individual examples. I really need his response to these examples because I need to know how much to press on things such as notices and concessions when we get to those parts of the Bill. If it is clear that the delegated powers cannot be misused, it makes it a lot easier to agree to other parts of the Bill. I apologise to the Committee for speaking at length, but I feel very strongly about this.