My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 127 on behalf of my noble friend Lord Purvis, who is unfortunately unable to come today due to other constraints. My noble friend wanted me to thank the Minister and her officials for the meetings that they have had, which he found helpful but, needless to say, some questions lingered. I will go through those questions and I hope that, from the Dispatch Box, the Minister will be able to satisfy me in lieu of my noble friend. Perhaps she is lucky that he is somewhere else and I am here.
First, if there was an agreement on a specific need for social, labour and environmental conditions, as long as they are non-discriminatory, in the Australia agreement, why can this not be common across the Bill to make it clear that authorities can write these factors into programmes? Secondly, if we have signed what we signed with Australia—which we have—can we do the same with all other treaty suppliers in the schedule, even if it is not stated in the respective treaties? In other words, there is a carryover to the treaty suppliers in the schedules. We believe that officials have suggested that this is the case, but can the Minister clarify this point?
As so much of our procurement is with the EU, would it not be better if we worked harder to get the same language in our regulations as it has in its regulations, where it does not compromise the Government’s principles, so that procuring bodies have a simple and straightforward approach to this?
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My final point comes back to an earlier one: how much time and effort has the department anticipated for each procurement body to have to familiarise itself with each schedule arrangement in each trade agreement? At the moment, each procuring authority will need to check each of the treaty sections on procurement, whereas in the past it was simple and all compiled inside the EU scheme. I do not think we are convinced that it was all GPA anyway, as much as officials have said so; there are deviations. The Minister talks about impediments and blocking up the system. This could well be an inadvertent blocking of the system that the Minister might like to address. I beg to move.