Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I will speak now, as I think it is probably the appropriate moment; I am sorry if I have jumped in over the noble Viscount, Lord Younger. On the next group, I was going to apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, and say that I would have signed his amendments had I seen them and organised myself in time; however, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, is absolutely right that the two groups fit together. There are just a couple of things that I want to say in relation both to the amendments addressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, and to those tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. Independence is absolutely crucial but I am not sure that writing in the word “independent” is quite the right way to approach this. I am not a lawyer but how you define whether someone is independent strikes me as a difficult task; it might exclude someone who has donated a large amount of money to a political party in order then to be appointed to that job, for example, but there are a lot more finer cases than that. This is why I preferred the amendments put down by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, which would allow a review by the Treasury Committee; to me, that is genuinely independent oversight of a body to ensure that it is independent. None the less, I will address this group of amendments, together with those from the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. I will pick up the points made earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who is not currently in her place, about the level of public distrust that has arisen since the situation with Covid procurement. I was recently on LBC television talking about defence procurement—a subject that is very much in the news at the moment—when I was quite surprised to see, across a broad political spectrum of people, the level of distrust that there is around government defence procurement and the issues that have arisen in that space. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, said, these are really important issues of public trust. We know that we have a huge problem with public trust in our institutions at the moment.