---

Financial Services Bill

The reason is that there has been much talk in this Committee about the process of wash-up, but the plain fact is that we do not know when Parliament will be dissolved. We do not know for how many days we will be processing business. We, as the House of Lords, have to carry on as if the Bill will have the normal process of Committee, Report and Third Reading. That is what we seek to do. We cannot possibly work on any basis other than that a Bill that the Government choose to put before the House will be considered in the normal way. Noble Lords might want to anticipate both the timing of the election and the nature of the decisions that will be made by the parties in dealing with legislation that has not completed its passage before then, but it is not an appropriate topic for this Committee to debate. We have to take the Bill as we find it and scrutinise it in the way that we normally undertake our work. It is of course disturbing, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, pointed out, that arrangements are apparently being made within the FSA as if the Bill will receive Royal Assent by 1 April. The Minister shakes his head, but I, too, have heard what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, appears to have heard about the preparations being made with a specific date in mind; it is more than a mere planning assumption. Indeed, they are incurring expenditure on recruiting somebody to head the new consumer financial education body. It has been clear for some time that this Bill could not receive Royal Assent by 1 April by any stretch of the imagination. So that clearly raises some questions which need to be answered, and I hope that at some point we will get proper answers. The real meat of what we have been talking about for the last hour and a half—