My Lords, I too express my admiration to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, for her work on this group with the Minister and support the amendments in her name. To pick up on what the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said about infinite ping-pong, it can be used not only to avoid making a decision but as a form of power and of default decision-making—if you cannot get the information back, you are where you are. That is a particularly important point and I add my voice to those who have supported it.
I have a slight concern that I want to raise in public, so that I have said it once, and get some reassurance from the Minister. New subsection (B1)(d) in Amendment 134 concerns the Secretary of State directing Ofcom to change codes that may affect
“relations with the government of a country outside the United Kingdom”.
Many of the companies that will be regulated sit in America, which has been very forceful about protecting its sector. Without expanding on this too much, when it was suggested that senior managers would face some sort of liability in international fora, various parts of the American Government and state apparatus certainly made their feelings clearly known.
I am sure that the channels between our Government and the US are much more straightforward than any that I have witnessed, but it is absolutely definite that more than one Member of your Lordships’ House was approached about the senior management and said, “This is a worry to us”. I believe that where we have landed is very good, but I would like the Minister to say what the limits of that power are and acknowledge that it could get in a bit of a muddle with the economic outcomes that we were talking about, celebrating that they had been taken off the list, and government relations. That was the thing that slightly worried me in the government amendments, which, in all other ways, I welcome.