My Lords, my noble friend the Minister has a difficulty with his throat, and I commiserate with him on that. He also has a difficulty with the Bill. He wants to have a Bill which is highly prescriptive, but his answer to those who wish to amend it is that that would make it too prescriptive. The question is: what are the bounds of prescription, and has he given an adequate defence of them? It may be the heat, but I suspect we are condemned this afternoon to receiving a series of responses from Ministers which are not as adequate and embracing of our original ideas as one might hope.
It has been a very important debate because it is about the principles underlying the Bill. My noble friend said that there was a degree of confusion and contradiction in the debate. There is often confusion in debate when you have a broad range and number of topics to discuss, but I do not think there was any contradiction if one understands that the debate on principles has been taking place on two levels. The first is about what the principles should be—whether they should involve what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, has suggested should be incorporated and whether they should involve a certain interpretation of value for money. We all agree that has to be an element of it, but what does that actually mean? That has been the tenor of part of the debate. I have said that I intend to remain neutral in a sense on that question.
The second level on which we have been debating the principles is: on the assumption that we can agree what the principles are, what role do they then play? What purchase or leverage do they give in the procurement process? In particular, should they be a basis on which disappointed contractors should be able to nitpick through this procedural Bill in order to bring complaints when, in my view, it would be better if they were limited to doing that only if the broad principles of the Bill—which we might have agreed on—had been breached? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, clearly grasped that point, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, heartily agreed that we should ensure that there is a degree of flexibility in the tendering process so that unforeseen circumstances that lead to idiotic outcomes can be handled in a sensible way.
My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe made a similar point, but I am going to quibble with her very slightly, because she used the word “frequent” in reference to frequent legal challenges to procurement processes. In my experience, they are not very frequent, because what happens is that precise attention to the detail of the process is often prioritised over sensible outcomes in order to avoid those legal challenges in the first place. The structure of the approach that we are taking often leads to poor outcomes in procurement terms precisely to avoid legal challenges, but we congratulate ourselves on having gone through a successful procurement even though we have a suit with a pair of trousers with one leg shorter than the other, or something like that.