My Lords, I shall be brief and start with Amendment 79. We could join in the chorus of approval and my noble friend Lady Brinton could come up with dozens of examples that justify the noble Lord’s amendment but, in the interests of time, we will not. If noble Lords would like more examples, I am sure my noble friend could provide them. We very much support Amendment 79.
I commend the noble Lord for persuading the Public Bill Office to allow him to table Amendment 53. The spirit is very much met. Given the nature of all the digital Bills, with which he is completely familiar, I suspect this is an argument we will have again and again in those Bills. The spirit is correct.
I want to say a few words on Amendment 52 which are different from the words noble Lords have heard. I sit on the International Agreements Committee and we look at the CPTPP trade deal. Rules of origin are central to all this. The nature of CPTPP is that, for example, a product built in Malaysia can start to move freely within the countries that are signatories to that trade deal. Whether we have the details of the components of that product before it starts moving around our alliance depends on His Majesty’s Government asserting their right to know what is in those products. Whether the Government like it or not, in this Bill, with their signing of the CPTPP, they are going to have to start to interest themselves in a detailed way on what is in the stuff travelling around the CPTPP.
Why is that? One of the biggest exporters of components into Malaysia is China. That brings us back to the whole China question, which I will not repeat here. If, for example, we find that that country is the subject of either embargo or tariff, we will really have to know what is going on in all those products. So it makes a lot of sense, from the very start, for the department to flex its muscles and develop its skills to understand the supply chains of the things coming through people’s doors every day, courtesy of the large online retailers.
When a piece of electrical stuff comes through our door, we have absolutely no idea what is in it, where it was made and its safety for our families. We cannot know that without knowing the supply chain and the rules of origin of what is moving around our country. It is difficult, of course, but it is something in which we will have to increasingly interest ourselves.