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Sale of Student Loans Bill

My amendment is one of those little amendments that changes ““may”” to ““shall””. It refers to subsection (6), in which the transfer arrangements ““may”” prohibit, and so on. The question is whether it should be ““shall””. The issue was discussed at some length in the other place, the main objection to it being ““shall”” relates to the classification. It is another piece of business under Eurostat and ONS rules. For example, if, "““prohibit the making of further transfer arrangements without the Secretary of State’s consent””" is ““shall””, it counts as being within the public sector and the debt and, therefore, the risks are not transferred; whereas if it is ““may””, the debt can be transferred over. We have ““may”” rather than ““shall”” entirely because of this quirk of meaning, interpretation and definition within the framework of our statistics regulations. That seems a very poor reason for not having ““shall”” because, on the whole, it would be a good idea if it was made clear. If we are setting up the special-purpose vehicle, the student loans will be serviced by the Student Loans Company, which is, as we know, a public company and so forth. It is all really rather unsatisfactory if they can in fact then be sold on, perhaps to some multinational agency which is not the slightest bit concerned about the welfare of the students. Although there are reservations within the Bill, it might well get out of hand. ““Shall”” is therefore a better word to have here than ““may””. In general, I have quite a lot of sympathy with the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, which effectively picks up the same point: it is important to try to keep tabs on who may buy up these loans. In the multinational monetary markets, it would be unfortunate if an Enron bought up these loans, and we would, on the whole, prefer not to see one doing so. So I have some sympathy with Amendments Nos. 11 and 12, and not much with the excuse that this is how ““public sector”” is currently defined. We really ought to query that, and it should not drive how we draft legislation.