Lord Hayward (Con)

My Lords, I follow my noble friend Lord Fuller in his expression of concern about the impact on small businesses. Sadly, many noble Lords will know me as a statistician who spends all his time looking at opinion polls and numbers in one direction or another and then commenting on them. I have spent inadequate time looking at the impact assessment, to which no reference has been made yet in these debates. Despite my apparent facility for statistics, all I can say about the impact assessment is that my head hurts. I found it incredibly difficult to comprehend page after page of low-impact, central-impact and high-impact estimates. I will comment on one section. I could comment on others, but I address my comments overall. I find it very difficult to understand the impact that each of the different events would have in terms of positives and negatives, because they are aggregated in a very odd way. Page 41 of the impact assessment refers to the impact on street traders. It says: “The low estimate reflects that 50% of traders will be able to continue to trade due to potential mitigations”. Therefore, 50% of the traders will not be able to continue trading—and that is the low estimate. It goes on to say: “The central estimate reflects the likelihood that 75% of traders in the affected area will be unable to trade while the provisions are in place. The high estimate serves as an upper bound where all traders operating in areas where prohibitions apply are unable to trade”. We are therefore talking about a very substantial impact on businesses. We debated earlier the duration under which these provisions would apply, but we are talking about potentially every single street trader in those relevant areas. There are pages identifying the numbers of traders affected, whether it be at the Everton stadium, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, at Hampden Park in Glasgow or wherever you choose to name. There are numbers and numbers of street traders. That is their livelihood. If these events are running for several weeks, which is likely to be the case, they are losing their livelihood for that period. I therefore share my noble friend Lord Fuller’s concerns about the impact that is identified—but identified in such a complex way that it is incredibly difficult to understand what we are talking about.