Baroness Noakes (Con)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who took part in this debate, which has demonstrated that there is unanimity on this side of the Committee on scale not being the most important thing—in direct contrast to the Government’s dogged attachment to scale. We will probably return to innovation next week, so the Minister will not escape it, but I do not think the Government yet understand how innovation works and what it takes to scale a business: the timescales involved, the way you need to raise finance during the growth of a business, and the impact that what they have put in the Bill will have on those processes. We will need to explore that in much more detail. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, who wished to do so, is absolutely right, because I do not think the Government really understand what is involved in this area. On “big is best”, which we on this side of the Committee certainly do not subscribe to, the Government said that the primary objective was savers’ outcomes, but a couple of minutes later the Minister said that the objective was consolidation. Is there a hierarchy of objectives in this Bill? It is not clear to me that there is. A few sentences away, she talked about the benefits that derive from scale, but the Government seem to have closed their mind to this: if you can get equivalent benefits without scale, why should you not? That was immediately followed by the Minister saying that when you are in a £25 billion-plus fund, you put double the money into productive finance. There we are into the real objective of this Bill: to funnel savers’ money into productive investment. I refer the Minister to my comments on each policy objective needing a policy instrument and getting into terrible trouble when you try to get one policy instrument to meet more than one objective. I was reminded of this by one of her Back-Benchers, who kindly pointed out that clear rule, which is well evidenced. I will not disclose his identity, and he is not going to get up and say it, but I really think the Government should look again at how they are using the instruments in this Bill to achieve what are clearly multiple objectives, not disclosed in a hierarchy and not even acknowledged as being potentially in conflict. We will clearly not progress any further in Committee, but the Minister should be in no doubt that this will be a feature of our discussions on Report. I beg leave to withdraw.