My Lords, I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said about the helpfulness of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, in tabling these amendments. It is curious that, in this clause, changes in technology and developments in scientific understanding are allowed to be taken account of but other factors are not. I would have thought, given the Windsor Framework, that we ought to be taking account of developments in the economies of our trading partners and their regulatory developments, because under that framework they are going to have an impact on what we are able to do in the UK and our approach to regulation and divergence. That is becoming increasingly clear, which is why we are seeing questions such as that asked by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, of the noble Lord, Lord Caine, yesterday at Oral Questions. We do not yet have a sense that the Government are on top of this. It is as if they have done this Bill and then done something somewhere else, and no one has asked about how those two things will overlap.
When I first saw this clause, I thought, “This is a real problem because Ministers are going to get too much power to do things without accountability, rather like the discussions we have had before”, but actually even more questions are raised about the privileging of technology and scientific understanding ahead of anything else. It would be good to understand where that has come from and what Ministers had in mind when they included it in the Bill. Might they come to regret not making clear that this is not an exhaustive list, or something like that, as they have in other clauses? We are not clear what is meant by the phrase
“considers appropriate to take account of”,
so perhaps some examples might be in order.