Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for their contributions to this important debate. On the comments made at the outset by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, I am open-minded about whether the Bill should contain what is effectively a veto or whether it should accord with the more usual practice. As I said, if the Minister were to give an undertaking that she would come back with an amendment framed in those terms at Third Reading, I would be willing not to press this amendment to a Division, but I have not heard that commitment from her, which is a disappointment. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is obviously scarred by his personal experience. I simply remind him that hard cases make bad law, and his sounds like a particularly hard case, for which he has my sympathy. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, seemed to be recommending—arguing, really—that there should be no pre-appointment scrutiny at all, let alone whether it should be in the Bill. Therefore, he is presumably urging the Minister to withdraw the commitment she has made that there should be pre-appointment scrutiny. On the substantive point he made in arguing that scrutiny would turn the regulator into a political football, the reverse is actually the case. It is important that the regulator should be genuinely independent, and my experience of observing these scrutiny procedures is that Select Committees are particularly concerned to test the capability of the nominee to exercise genuine, robust independence. Rather than turning the nominee into someone who is overly influenced by the scrutiny, it is to test whether they are capable of withstanding it. That is the consideration. I am grateful for all contributions, but in the absence of the quite modest commitment I have requested the Minister to make, I want to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 8.