Baroness Kramer (LD)

My Lords, I will be brief, which has been my practice—as people may have noticed —throughout much of this Bill. I open by saying thank you to the Minister and to the Box. They have been very willing to share their time with us, brief us and listen to issues that we raised. We did not always get the response that we wanted, but it was a positive engagement that gives us some hope for making progress. I think the Minister came to this Bill having been told that it was a minor, technical Bill. That probably could not have been more wrong. I am glad we achieved what we did, working across the Opposition Benches. I give credit to Conservative Peers—the noble Baronesses, Lady Noakes and Lady Neville-Rolfe, and others—as well as, on my side, to my noble friends Lady Bowles and Lord Sharkey in trying to deal with the issues around proportionality. There is a great deal left in accountability that will have to be tackled in future Bills. As we see the speed-up in AI, crypto and the other rapid changes that are coming, we will have to find a new way, as a Parliament, to engage. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for putting in an amendment that began to deal with the digital issue. I really believe that not covering that within this Bill was a miss-out. The Government will have to step up to the plate again very shortly. I am also very grateful for the fact that we got support on the child trust fund issue, again from the Tory Benches. It is something I feel very personally, as people can probably guess. It benefits 80,000 disabled youngsters who have been unable to access money that is theirs that is sitting in trust fund accounts. I thank my noble friend Lord Sharkey in particular for fighting the battle for the FOS—that battle is not over either. I also thank my noble friends Lady Northover and Lady Sheehan; we would have gone farther on the climate change, environment and deforestation issues, but we feel that an important step was taken by the Government in the amendments moved today. This has been a very constructive Bill, but, frankly, it was not the maximum use that could have been made of a financial services Bill and I hope that we will see another one come along shortly. There are problems to be tackled, not least the issues of mortgage prisoners and community development financial institutions, as well as the utterly significant constitutional issue of accountability and how the regulators need to be effectively accountable to Parliament. I thank the whole House for working on a very complex set of issues, particularly as it entered this phase with the understanding that it was only going to be about minor technicalities.