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Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill [Lords] [Ways and Means]

I have declared my interest in the Register of Members’ Interests; I am a company director, but I am obviously not pursuing its interests in this debate. I am worried about the resolution’s proving to be a tax on jobs—the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Anne Main). It is a great pity that the original system has not worked as well as planned, and that we now need this expensive new one to try to ensure that people are properly protected. Given the phenomenal improvements of modern technology, in most parts of the world and in most cases the application of such technology cuts the cost of doing things and makes it easier to do them. But in the case of this Government, we often seem to find that the application of new technology makes it more difficult to do things, that they are done less well, and that a large amount of money has to be spent on remedial action. Indeed, I find it disappointing that the Minister did not give us some financial information when initiating this short debate. This is not an aperitif to the main meal: it is a very important subject in its own right. As my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans said, in effect, we are talking about taxing institutions and people who are trying to do their best in public service, for example, and it is very important that the Minister and his colleagues have proper controls over the setting up and efficiency of this operation, how it controls its costs and how it uses new computing systems to lower those costs. There should be no automatic assumption that when the costs and fees are reviewed in subsequent years, they are going to go up. It would be quite nice to have an assumption that they will be coming down because computing and efficiency measures will be applied to reduce them, as happens in the competitive market in comparable service areas outside this Government’s dream world, in which they can always claim more money from the taxpayer to do such things. So although the Opposition do not wish to detain the House unduly or to stop the benign intentions behind the underlying measure, the Government should take much more seriously the question of how much all this is going to cost, how they are going to ensure that this board keeps its costs under control, and whether it could surprise us all in two or three years’ time by announcing that it has got better at doing these things and could have a fee cut, rather than an increase. I fear, however, that we are going to have more of the same. We have had an inflation-busting fee increase recently and unless the Minister gets a grip, we will have the same again in a few years’ time. So I hope that he will look again at this issue.