I thought that the debate would be quite clear, but it has become rather more muddled as we have moved along. There will not be any reluctance  on the part of the commissioner—certainly not the commissioner or ombudsman who gave evidence at the evidence session—to investigate matters that are within its remit. In the same way, there has been no reluctance on the part of prisons inspectors—Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, the chief inspector of the constabulary or of the probation service, or all the other senior inspecting officials—to investigate matters within their remit. The only reluctance comes from Ministers. This is not a party political point. I am sure that in the last Conservative Government there were occasions when my colleagues would have preferred things not to have come out and when they did come out, preferred them not be investigated, but that is not the point. The point is that when things go wrong and offices are created to investigate things that go wrong, they should jolly well get on and investigate them and not feel in the least bit inhibited. There is a confusion: the Bill will give the commissioner the powers of a High Court judge to summon people and documents. Whether he can summon the Secretary of State or summon documents from his Department it will be interesting to find out in due course, when he sends a request to the Secretary of State using the powers given him in the Bill.

The Minister seems to be saying that clause 37 is essentially about ad hoc investigation. If the Government want to use the office holder to carry out a particular function on an ad hoc basis, they are appointing the man and not the office holder. We must distinguish between the office of the commissioner and the individual office holder, who may or may not be requested to hold an inquiry, in the same way that a judge or a chairman of a statutory inquiry might be requested to do so by the Government. When we have a train disaster, the Government often set up either a judicial or other statutory inquiry, but that does not affect the position of the coroner as an office holder. In the clause, the Government are saying that there may be circumstances in which they want particular investigations to take place. I am not suggesting that the Government should not be enabled to cause particular people to carry out particular investigations, but it is not apt to do so under clause 37.

My suspicion, which has not been allayed by the arguments put forward by the hon. Lady either in response to me or the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, is that the Government want the Secretary of State to have some form of direction, a power of control, over matters that the commissioner should look into. I do not think that that is right; either we have an independent commissioner or we do not, and on the face of the Bill we do not.

I shall not press the amendment to a Division, but I urge the Government to be clear in their thinking. To elide functions and to allow confusion to exist, either because the Government want that to happen or because they have not thought about it, is not a sensible way to make legislation. As I am happy to tell the Minister of State, this a plum-duff of a Bill. It is a complete meccano set of lots of different things bolted together; it is an ugly Bill and a badly-designed one. We should be even more careful when we have a Bill of this nature not to make mistakes and not to allow the Government to put things in that they have not properly thought about.

As a condition of my withdrawal of the amendment, I ask the Government to think a little more carefully before we have to deal with this sort of measure in future.