Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000 (Amendment) Order 2007

On this occasion, I am grateful that the order is affirmative, because that gives the Minister the opportunity to tell the Committee on behalf of the Home Office that they have got something wrong yet again. As the Explanatory Memorandum puts it and as the Minister explains, the purpose of the order is to correct some omissions in the consequential amendments made by the Fraud Act 2006 and so on. The order seeks—I noticed that the Minister said ““seeks””—to correct those omissions. I hope that he has got it right for once. The only point that I want to make is one that I have made before. I believe that we have had some 62 pieces of primary legislation from the Home Office since 1997, compared with something like 50 in the previous century. Presumably we have had far more statutory instruments than that. Will the Minister let me know how many statutory instruments have emanated from the Home Office over the years? As I and others have made clear, it is that enormous number of orders and other pieces of legislation from the Home Office that has led to mistakes and is likely to lead to further mistakes, so perhaps a period of silence from the Home Office would be no bad thing to allow some things to bed down and to prevent it from making yet more mistakes. I therefore hope that the Minister has got it right on this occasion. I also hope that he can confirm the figures that I gave and give some estimate of the number of statutory instruments that have come out of the Home Office.