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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister. We certainly support him in his Amendments 60 and 69C and we are especially grateful for the work that the Government have done on omnibus orders. We think that they have arrived at a sensible and proper solution, as the Minister said. As for the sunset provision, when we first broached this subject in Committee, the Bill was a very bad one. That is why we wanted to sunset the whole Bill. Since then we have genuinely engaged with the Minister and reached a very good compromise. Since Committee the Bill—its content and its architecture—has been radically transformed. Although my noble friend Lord Hunt will seek further change to the Bill's architecture at our next sitting on Report, we are content that the sunsetting of the schedules is adequate. We believe it right and proper that at the beginning of every Parliament there is the potential to have what would in essence be a new Public Bodies Bill. However, we also believe that the architecture is such that it could be maintained while looking again at the schedules. By sunsetting the schedules, the bodies that are currently in the schedule will have the comfort of knowing that if nothing has happened to them within the four or five-year period, they will be free, as it were; and the bodies that are not included will know that they can continue to work efficiently and effectively without a medium-term sword of Damocles hanging over them. We are therefore very grateful to the Minister for the changes to which he has agreed, and we look forward to the adoption of the amendments in question.