Northern Ireland Bill (Allocation of Time)

—the agent for elephants, whether in the room or elsewhere. I look forward to a day when the elephants might gain membership of this House and speak for themselves. If I live to be 100, I shall never understand the logic that the Government employ in drafting timetable motions. We see on today’s Order Paper that consideration of the allocation of time motion can last for up to three hours. The entire time available for consideration of that motion and Second Reading is four hours so, as the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) pointed out, it is quite possible that if we used the three hours, and there was then a Division, we would have significantly less than an hour for the Second Reading of a constitutional Bill. It is because it is a constitutional Bill that all stages are, quite properly, to be taken on the Floor of the House. Thereafter, we are allowed two hours for debate in Committee and on Third Reading. I consider that wholly inadequate. Given the number and range of amendments tabled and selected for debate in Committee, it is pretty clear to me that we will not have anything like a Third Reading debate; we will not even have a proper Committee stage. If ever there was a Bill that needed a proper Third Reading, this is it. Third Reading debates are pretty much a poor shadow of what they used to be. If there is a Division on Second Reading, we Liberal Democrats will support the Bill. Thereafter, in Committee, we will consider a number of significant amendments, which we will seek to press to a Division. If those amendments are not accepted, my party may well wish to reconsider our support for Third Reading, but we will be denied that opportunity, and we will not be alone in that. It is pretty clear that we are being asked to railroad through legislation, and although there may be a degree of urgency, it is not, by any definition, an emergency. As a consequence, we will create a procedure that is fundamentally flawed and defective. I have previously been involved with Northern Ireland Bills that were dealt with in one day in the House. We always co-operated in those cases. I think back to my involvement with the Bill that had to be brought forward to cancel Assembly elections—I think that was in 2004. That was clearly an emergency; this is not. Even if we insisted on sticking to the Secretary of State’s timetable—he says that the timetable must allow consultation in Northern Ireland to start in the middle of March—it would still be possible for us to have two days’ full consideration of the Bill. Tomorrow, the House has an Adjournment debate. On Monday, we have a second day on estimates. There is absolutely no reason why we could not put that business off to some other day, and instead deal with the Bill then. In fact, we should do so. This is not just about the progress of the Bill, but about this House taking responsibility for, and control of, its own business. Bills will be railroaded through in this way for as long as we continue to allow it to happen. The situation will never get any better.