Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

I have hon. Friends on both sides of the Chamber so I, too, shall call the hon. Gentleman my hon. Friend in this matter. He is right. Anything within the terms of the order, and that the Minister has correctly assessed as within the terms of the order, must be so in the view of the Select Committee because it has to apply the same criteria. Therefore, any political judgment on the essential question of what is controversial means nothing in the context of the provision. We were told at the start of the Bill’s proceedings that it would not be used for anything controversial. Then, the Government elevated the threshold slightly and said that it would not be used for anything ““highly”” controversial. I hope that we have now gone back to ““controversial””. Unless we make the necessary amendments, the whole measure will be meaningless. If the opportunity arises, I shall press hard my amendment (c) to Government amendment No. 46, because removing those constraints is crucial to the work of Select Committees. Even if that were achieved, we would still have the problem, alluded to in a short debate between the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) and most of his hon. Friends on the Back Benches, who did not agree with him, about a genuine parliamentary veto. A Select Committee has a Government majority. If the purpose of the safeguard is to ensure that something that is deeply controversial to a section of the House—whether on the Government Benches or elsewhere—is not put through a fast-track procedure, a simple majority in a Select Committee with a Government majority will not do the job, however assiduously the Committee may attempt to do its job. With the best will in the world, its members may not be aware of the local implications of an order put through by that process that might be deeply controversial. The procedure can be used not only for general public Acts, but for local Acts. The Regulatory Reform Committee or its successor might be completely unaware of a particular local Act, not because Members had not done their research properly, but because there was a burning political issue—we are, after all, politicians, which is why we are sent to this place—of which they were unaware because none of them was from that area.