I am most grateful, Mr. Hood.

I was merely saying that this morning we had a generally constructive debate, as both sides of the Committee will acknowledge, and in moving my amendment I was keen to be equally constructive and helpful to the Minister. The Bill may have been drafted in advance of knowledge of the Government's latest initiative that we learned about this morning, which seems inconsistent with the wording of subsection (5) that we propose in our amendment should be deleted. In The Guardian this morning—I suspect that it is regarded with almost as much affection on the Labour Benches as it is on the Opposition Benches—the lead story was entitled ''Labour in retreat on targets'' and it stated:

''The government will today signal a change of direction . . . promising to release the energies of state schools and hospitals by lifting the dead hand of central control.''

That is a wonderful and welcome U-turn. It then stated that the Prime Minister wishes

''to escape the reputation for control-freakery that became established in the early years of his administration.''

In that new spirit of liberating the public sector from control-freakery and excessive control, we turn to subsection (5) which states:

''Programmes and estimates . . . must be given—

(a) in the form required by the Secretary of State, and

(b) at the times required by the Secretary of State.''

One begins to see that that is not entirely consistent with moving away from control-freakery and some may say that it is a classic example of control-freakery taken to a great extreme. Given that the earlier subsections of clause 3 sensibly require that the arts and humanities research council should report to the Secretary of State on how it spends public money, which is an entirely sensible and worthwhile objective, I shall be interested to hear from the Minister why it is that instead of setting out those reports in ways that are mutually agreed or that are in accordance with certain times of the financial year, the council should be required to do so in a manner and at times specified by the Secretary of State. Does not that give the Secretary of State rather too much arbitrary power in such matters and unnecessarily reduce the autonomy of the council? Does not it risk leaving the council with the status of supplicant to and servant of the Secretary of State rather than esteemed adviser to him, which we would all prefer?

I understand that the article in The Guardian is not an isolated report and that the Secretary of State for Health has been explaining the change in direction at the heart of the Government's new approach to the public services. I gather that the Secretary of State for Education and Skills will make announcements along the same lines either today or tomorrow. The

amendment was drafted in ignorance of what The Guardian would say this morning and the new direction that the Government would set out. None the less, I wonder whether the Government might accept that it has turned out to be unusually prescient and helpful to the Minister. By embracing our amendment, he can demonstrate even more so than we had ever suspected that he is at the cutting edge of new Labour and the new transformation, that he is one of those who will wield the sword Excalibur to chop off the head of control freakery. I invite him to do that by accepting the amendment.