Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for his reply at the end of the debate. If I may, I will come back to that in a second. I first want to thank all noble Lords who have spoken, many of them on the other side of the Chamber from me, and one on my side, on the Back Bench here, because there is clearly great public support for the Bill. We are determined that it should pass and that it should work, but we believe that, for it to work effectively, there must be a commitment by the Home Office, the Security Industry Authority and other interested bodies to make certain that there are people in place in the organisations affected who are properly informed and trained in what their duties and responsibilities are going to be. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, spotted the fact that I had the word “may” in my amendment, and not “must”, which does, I hope, leave the Government with some discretion as to how it wants to implement the two-year consultation and implementation period. I hope that there was enough in my noble friend’s speech to indicate that, if it is going to be necessary for some form of structure to be established, it will be necessary not only for guidance to be available; the implementation of that guidance will need to be properly organised, either with public funds or through some other means of providing trainers who are able to do that. I hope that that opportunity is not ruled out and that there is going to be determination to ensure that the Bill, when it becomes an Act, will be implemented effectively and that the organisations that are required to implement it feel comfortable and are not affected financially by having to take on these responsibilities. For the moment, I will of course ask the Committee to allow me to withdraw the amendment, but I hope that my noble friend is clear: there is a lot of support for the propositions that all of us have been making in this debate and I hope that we can come back to this at a later stage to see how we can implement them. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.