European Union Bill

My Lords, this has been a very wide-ranging debate, covering all these amendments. Some very wise and profound observations have been made. It would be quite wrong not to say that many of the points raised feed into the arguments, the presentation of the Bill and how Ministers should think about it. There are matters on which to reflect, which we will no doubt come back to again and again. Indeed, on the track record so far, we are likely to come round this course several times. There are still some serious misunderstandings about the nature and purposes of the Bill. It ranges over several extremely complex issues. The whole EU structure and its legislative underpinnings are enormously complex and have grown over decades from a series of legislation, treaty-making and so on. I do not disguise that for a moment. If noble Lords would find it useful, I am willing to put on record that I am very open, as are my colleagues, to any degree of informal discussions to elucidate what is intended by the Bill, since some noble Lords are perhaps, in their own words, still confused about aspects of it. These amendments are wide-ranging but they nearly all have the same broad objective. They are designed to remove requirements for a referendum or Acts of Parliament from the list of decisions in Clause 6. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, rightly said, their intention is to shorten the list. I want to explain why we should not shorten the list and to deal particularly with the passerelles.