My Lords, I thank the Minister for his attempts to answer my questions and those of many noble Lords. I will not detain the Committee for very long at all.
I am grateful to know that there will be a code and that it will be consulted on. Given that, it would have saved an awful lot of trouble if the Government had simply not put “may” in the Bill in the first place—that would have cut out a whole loop of this. I am very grateful to know that that is there. I agree with the Minister that we all want to know about and to clamp down on fraud and error; the question is one of proportionality.
When the Minister comes to write—I realise that this letter is turning into “War and Peace”, but it will make us all come to Report in a much better place if we can get a clearer answer to many of these questions— I still wonder whether he properly answered the question from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, about the legality of these powers, because the point about when they engage is crucial. The Minister is still coming back to a distinction between the gathering of the data and what the DWP will do using its existing “business as usual” powers, to investigate. I think the point the noble Lord was making is that the question of legality engages at the point of that data gathering, not at the point at which it is used, if I am correct. I am not sure that the Minister answered that—I am not inviting him to do it now—but I specifically suggest that he takes advice on that point before we come back on Report.
The other issue is that, if the Government have come in so late in the day introducing these powers into the Bill, it would have been better to have draft regulations before Report at the first stage. The Minister thinks the code can be available in the summer, but the summer is fast approaching so I see no reason why the usual channels could not accommodate the date for Report to allow us to go past the date for producing a draft code if the Government wish to. I realise that they may not wish to, but it must be perfectly possible—unless the Minister knows something I do not about a likely date of a general election, presumably we should still have time to do that. So I commend that thought to him.
However, we also know that a lot of the constraints he has described will happen solely in regulations. Everybody in this Committee is aware of the limitations of the capacity of both Houses to do anything about regulations. We cannot amend them here. The Government will bring them forward, but the capacity of us to do anything about that is small, so that is not as much of an assurance as it would be in other circumstances.
Finally, what I am left with is that these powers could do anything from something that might sound very proportionate to something that might sound entirely disproportionate, and we simply have not heard anything that enables us to make a judgment early enough to know where that is contained. I therefore ask the Government to think again before Report about ways in which they might provide assurance about a more contained and proportionate approach to these measures.
Since we are in Committee, in the meantime, I thank all noble Lords for their work on this and the Minister for his response. Before I beg leave to withdraw, I see that the Minister is intervening on me now, which is a joyful change.