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Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

I have no difficulty replying to this amendment; nor do I enlist sympathy from the House—certainly not after the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. After all, he accused me last night of saying exactly what the Prime Minister had said before. That is an accusation that I can bear with a certain degree of equanimity and I am prepared to repeat the position again today. What the Prime Minister was expressing at that time and what I hope to repeat as accurately today is the Government’s carefully considered position on this matter. Of course we take freedom of information seriously. By the by, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, continually berates me about the Lloyds TSB submission last September as some kind of constraint on my part to be secretive, but I have given him all the information that I can give him. Lloyds TSB came along with a suggestion of how £30 billion of public money could be made available for a particular project with which it would be involved. We did not think that that had a chance of coping with any issue with regard to state aid. As the proposition was put in those general terms, we were not able to respond positively. I am not sheltering under freedom of information because that is all the information that I have and I have given it to the noble Lord on repeated occasions. He cannot keep questioning me about the same issue. What he can keep asking me about—as he rightly did—is the desirability of the Freedom of Information Act applying to this company. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his record on freedom of information and his contribution in the past, but he will recognise that the Labour Administration is duly proud of the 2000 Act, which has produced enormous benefits to the public.