Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's intervention, because that is precisely what has happened. I do not think we should give way to a Joint Committee report that is plainly more reactionary than the centre of gravity of opinion in this House. It is possible to design arrangements so that there is a supervising Minister who has some say in overall policy on prosecution, but the idea that individual cases can be influenced by Ministers strikes me as being beyond the pale. Let us consider the civil service aspects of the Bill, on which, like the Conservatives' spokesperson and the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, I welcome the basic principle. There is, however, a minimalist feel to the way in which the idea of the "civil service Act" is being implemented in the Bill. What has happened to the idea, mentioned earlier in the debate, that special advisers should not be able to exercise Executive power and instruct civil servants? The Secretary of State says that there might be exceptions to that—I cannot think of any such circumstances that have led to good outcomes in the past. Even if there are exceptions, should not the Bill put in place the presumption that special advisers should not be able to do those things and provide for an open, transparent procedure—not an Order in Council—to make the exemptions clear and open in Parliament? Why should only selection into the civil service from the outside world—this is how I read the Bill—be subject to open and fair competition and merit? What has happened to the idea that promotion within the civil service should also be exclusively by merit and open competition? On a lesser but still important point, what has happened to the provision in respect of GCHQ, which was included in a previous draft of the Bill but has now been lost? Finally, and crucially, why does the Bill contain no legal duty on Ministers to respect civil service impartiality? The treaty ratification aspects of the Bill have been discussed extensively, but the conclusion that I have drawn from examining the Bill and listening to the debate is that what the Bill provides for is almost purely symbolic; it is not a real change. That is because the Government—this is the central issue with which the Public Administration Committee, which the hon. Member for Cannock Chase chairs, is grappling—have a complete stranglehold on what we get to vote on in this House. If a purely negative procedure is to be used in respect of treaties, this House will never get to vote on a treaty when the Government do not want us to do so. What the Bill says about the House of Lords is that the Government can simply, by fiat, ignore what it says on a treaty. In any case, clause 23 contains a general get-out clause allowing the Government to evade the entire proposed structure.