It is odd hearing the Minister’s response before we have spoken to the amendments. I just want to make a few comments about cost-benefit analysis, which is not an easy science. I am an avid observer of the Government’s attempts to do a cost-benefit analysis. Let us put it this way: it often leaves plenty to be desired when we start looking at how the Government have decided to cost the effect of their legislative suggestions, and we go into the detail of it and see how back-of-an-envelope and dubious some of it is. I do not want to sound too sarcastic, but perhaps if the CBA panels get to be good, they could teach the Government a thing or two about how to do their own analyses.

It is often a difficult but desirable thing to try to estimate the cost of particular suggestions, especially when regulators impose them in other areas. It is important that regulators think about proportionality for the industry itself. Also, in an industry where all the costs are likely to be passed on to the consumer, it is extremely important that it can be done sensibly, properly and in a way that stands up to scrutiny, and I hope that the scrutiny would be there for others to look at.

One often comes up against quite blank walls when trying to interrogate Government cost-benefit analyses, and one ends up going down dead ends and not really understanding how the judgments about the costs have been made, so the better we can get at the science in whatever context, the better for everybody.

It is important that Clause 42 exists to try to provide balance and transparency about who will be on the panels, because we would not want them to be captured by particular parts of the structure. We need to have some objectivity if their work is to have credibility and deserves to be taken into account in regulators’ decision making.