Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)

My Lords, I was due to give a very short speech. It is still short, but it has got slightly longer in terms of the content of this debate. I am particularly grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted and Lady Altmann, for tabling Amendment 10, which we welcome and which I understand to be a sensible and proportionate safeguarding measure. I want to go a bit further because there were two particularly powerful speeches, in particular that from the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles. As we read it, the amendment seeks to ensure that investment strategies cannot be used to favour particular investment vehicles over comparable or competing alternatives. In doing so, it would help to guard against strategies becoming a back-door means of directing capital, rather than serving their proper purpose as high-level statements of investment policy. That distinction matters. Investment strategies should guide objectives, risk appetite and approach and not hardwire specific vehicles or delivery mechanisms into statute or regulation. Preventing the embedding of such preferences also reduces the risk of political or regulatory pressure or—I will use the word—interference, being reflected in investment strategy documents and helps to preserve trustee independence and proper decision-making. Although it is a serious subject, the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, gave us a succinct, well-argued speech with her bucket wrapper analogy. She gave a hard-hitting speech with some important questions which I hope the Minister will be able to answer. One issue that has been made clear today, which has arisen in a number of debates, and was encapsulated in this short debate, is the opaqueness of “government direction”. I was very taken by the equally hard-hitting speech from my noble friend Lord Fuller. The confusion—by the way, the C is for confusion, just to add that in—is over the responsibility with the grey areas, notably in respect to the understandings, or not, from the Mansion House Accord and those who were the signatories. One question to ask is whether those signatories now realise what they have got themselves into, or what their understanding was then and what it is now. I ask that as an open question, particularly in relation to the inclusion or exclusion of different types of investment. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, focused particularly on open-ended or close-ended. There is a lot of emphasis here. Most unusually, I was in total agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I am not sure that that has happened with me in the past. To conclude, we therefore welcome the intent of Amendment 10. It would be very helpful if the Minister could indicate whether—and if so, how—the Bill as currently drafted already guards against this risk. It is a crucial question and relates to all the questions that have been asked. What assurances can be given that investment strategies will not be used to prescribe or favour particular investment vehicles in practice?