Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I welcome the spirit of this group of amendments. I am not clear that I understand entirely how the independent review process might work, but I do understand the importance of having an independent review process; the case for this was made convincingly by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. Despite the fact that we are whizzing through these amendments at great speed, I do not think that it would be right to underestimate the huge amount of power that this Bill gives the Cabinet Office. There appears to be an atmosphere of consensual camaraderie, which it is pleasant to be involved in—it may be an atmosphere I am less used to—but I emphasise the amount of concern outside this Committee about the implications of this Bill. The people who are concerned are not all hucksters or fraudsters: they are ordinary people who have genuine fears around the possibilities of the absolutely unintended consequences of the Bill if we do not have adequate safeguards. So I am keen on anything that strengthens safeguards. I hope, therefore, that the Government will consider these amendments seriously. I think that they are very helpful. I am particularly keen, of course, on the idea that liable persons, as they are described, deserve to have somewhere they can go to make an appeal. They deserve to know, as was suggested, that, if they have legitimate concerns, they will be heard. So much of what appears to be in this Bill happens behind the backs of liable persons, which creates an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and nervousness. I do not think that people are just being paranoid here. Consider—this has been mentioned before and will no doubt come up again—the Horizon scandal. There is nothing more frustrating than feeling as though you have been treated badly somehow but you do not know where to go. You have nowhere to appeal to. It may be that you have a perfectly legitimate explanation for something. What we saw in Horizon was “computer says no”. What we could have here is the Cabinet Office, which has just imposed something on you, not taking any notice if you should go and complain. That is a very important part of this: people deserve to know that their concerns can be heard, and so on. There is a danger in this discussion sometimes. I fear that, if one raises concerns about this Bill, there will be an inference that one is not taking fraud seriously. That is absolutely not the case. I have constantly made the point, for example, that I worry about the conflation of error and fraud. This does not mean to say, though, that, where there is genuine fraud, we should not want to clamp down on it as hard as we can. But it is also fair enough that we need to have a system in which there is public confidence. To clamp down on fraudulent activity, we need a watertight, safeguarded Bill that targets fraud and does not pick up any number of non-fraudulent issues, which will undermine public confidence. The intention of these amendments is to help enhance public confidence that there is a mechanism through which an independent body can review a process that could be corrupted inadvertently by a department having the capacity to mark its own homework, and, in that instance, not always see the wood for the trees when people raise concerns.