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Child Poverty Bill

The noble Lord has talked about cronyism, but the reverse is true. The whole point of the public appointments procedure was precisely to clean up appointments so that there was no cronyism for the Minister’s friends. What this is saying is that one, two or three people may be above the appointable line. If you do it any other way, it is who you know, as opposed to people coming into an open system, seeing a job description, applying for it and going through the interview process. I would not disagree with this at all, but there may well be a point at which the job description requirements, including the independence, appropriate skills and backgrounds, comes as part of regulations or comes to this House, as a letter to all people concerned. That is the way to do it, to ensure that the job description includes the possibility of the sort of people with the sort of background that we would like to see. To interfere with the public appointments procedure is to go back 10 or 15 years to cronyism, which would be quite disastrous. Could I suggest to noble Lords opposite that they focus on the issue of job description, rather than the mechanics of appointment, which are well established?