Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I agree wholeheartedly with the views put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond. With the House wanting to move on as swiftly as possible to Motion F, I will abandon the other remarks that I was going to make, save for one technical question of which I gave the Government advance notice. It is a minor matter, but we need an explanation on it. On Report, government Amendment No. 45 was debated with a group on which we divided, which affected the provision that we are reinstating. We did not object to Amendment No. 45 per se, but it was removed from the Bill simply because its text fell within Amendment No. 44, which removed lines 33 to 44 from the Bill. That sounds like double-Dutch—not meaning to be rude to the Dutch, of course. The text of Amendment No. 45 included a reference to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector for Justice, Community Safety and Custody. I pointed out at col. 65 in the Official Report on Report that there was a reference in the amendment to an organisation that we did not see come into effect, but I said that we would not debate it because we could do so at the next stage—and we talked about the prisons inspectorate. The Government have abandoned their plans to have the statutory Chief Inspector for Justice, Community Safety and Custody, which is welcome, but I want to be sure that the amendment that the Government put into the Bill then has not crept back in again. It is simply a matter of being sure that by agreeing to the Government’s Motion today no reference will creep back in to the conglomerate inspectorate. At what stage was the reference excised from the Bill?