Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I shall not anticipate my speech, but that illustrates why there ought to be an affirmative procedure, rather than a negative procedure. The negative procedure depends on the Opposition, or Government Back Benchers, noticing what is going on; with an affirmative procedure, the Government would be duty-bound to come to the House to explain what they had done. As they are in a far better position than the Opposition to know what they have done, that appears to be the right procedure. As the Minister just illustrated, the current rules—the Ponsonby rules—are a compromise between this House having real power and the Government having all the power. However, that is only a convention, and a grace and favour convention at that; the Minister mentioned that some Governments have not recognised it. It is entirely unsatisfactory, constitutionally, for this situation to continue. There have been numerous calls for reform—I need not go through them all. The Public Administration Committee even produced a draft Bill, drafted by Rodney Brazier, which the Government rejected, seemingly on the grounds that it would mean that Ministers would have to do more work, which does not appear to be a constitutional principle. Then we arrive at the White Paper of 2007, "The Governance of Britain", in which—this was the new Prime Minister's first great act as Prime Minister—the Government said that, contrary to their previous position, they would now move towards bringing into statute at least the conventions that we currently have, and promised to shift the balance between Parliament and the Government. However, the way in which clause 24 has been drafted means that it is hardly worth having. The Minister noted that part of the convention is that if an Opposition party—the main Opposition party or the third party—requests a debate and a vote on a treaty within a 21-day-period, the Government, by convention, use their power to grant that debate. Where is that stated in the Bill? It is simply not there. This is another case of the Government not wanting to be bound by statute in the exercise of their power to control the agenda of this House.