Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, I am again grateful to the Minister for his response and, indeed, to the noble Lord, Lord Fox, for his comments. On the ESG impositions and the general risk of coercion of smaller businesses by larger ones, I accept that these are already prohibited by law but I gently raise that the risk of coming forward with complaints of this kind often outweighs the benefits of redress. Essentially, small businesses are being coerced into ESG practices. That is still a problem and one that I hope a Government will address in the future. I thank the Minister for his outline of the Government’s approach to the retentions issues. I am genuinely optimistic from listening to him, because he has talked about a variety of different products that are available. We have had some briefings on those: performance bonds, retention bonds and, as he mentioned, the warranty bond. They tend to be more common practice in Europe; I think warranty bonds are only offered by a single firm in the United Kingdom at the moment. I hope that the market will provide solutions to this problem, because we think that some form of insurance would be effective and necessary in these circumstances. It cannot really be accepted as a retention payment alternative if it is currently so scarce, so we need to make sure that it is well understood publicly and perhaps mount a campaign with industry to make sure this is very well understood. I accept the noble Lord’s arguments about the difficulty of creating an exemption for resident-run properties. I will have a think about that further when I have a chance to read Hansard, but he made some good points. I hope that the Government will be able to update the House in due course on their progress in promoting these various different types of instruments. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.