Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am pleased that my hon. Friend says that the issue is not closed in the Government's mind. Although I do not plan to press the amendment to a Division today, my colleagues on the Joint Committee in the other place may well bring it back. One of the advantages of the Joint Committee is that we can operate a double act between the two Houses to follow up issues raised in one House or the other. I am pleased that the Government have given an assurance that they will continue with the process of laying explanatory memorandums, but as my hon. Friend indicated in his response, it does not follow that a future Government would do the same. He mentioned that the Ponsonby rule was introduced under a Labour Government—very good. It was, in effect, abolished by the Conservative Government. It was a convention, not in statute. Once the rule is in statute, it would be difficult for a future Government of whatever hue to repeal it. They would have to come to the House to do that, whereas they did not have to do so to break with a convention. There is nothing to stop a future Government saying, "We will continue with the statutory duty to lay the treaty, but not the duty—because it is not a duty, just a convention—to lay an explanatory memorandum." This matter is important because of the timetable. This Bill proposes a very strict timetable, and we will debate later the provisions for its extension—or, as a mirror image of that, its removal. The point is that very few of the things that we do here are subject to such a tight timetable. I mentioned earlier the problems that we had with the Libya prisoner transfer treaty, when we did not have the material in time to produce a report at all. We were able to publish only the exchange over the reasons why the treaty was not going to be extended, so this is quite an important issue. I should also like to take further the question that I raised in my earlier intervention on the Minister. He suggested that the amendment required too much detail, but it does not require any more detail than the present arrangements. It is up to the Government to say what should or should not go into the explanatory memorandum. There are three basic requirements in the amendment. The first two are that the explanatory memorandum should set out the background to a treaty and why it should be ratified, and I do not see the difficulty with either of those. However, the most important requirement in the amendment is its proposal that the explanatory memorandum should set out the reasons for any interpretive declarations or reservations. That is because until we see the explanatory memorandum, we cannot know what the Government may be proposing in relation to reservations. Only when we see the explanatory memorandum can we be aware of what they are proposing in that regard, or even whether there will be any reservations.