There is a danger in Committee that we get sidetracked into rehashing the whole of the Second Reading debate, and I certainly want to avoid that at all costs. Moreover, I have no basic problems with the structural phrasing of clauses 3 and 4, unlike clause 6, which we debated yesterday and will be discussing further anon.
I want first to put on the record what I think my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General, in a helpful series of exchanges with various Members, has already confirmed and then to point out one interaction with clause 6. I understood him to say that at an appropriate point, either on Report or in another place—on Report, I hope—the Government would come forward with some mixture, to be decided, of changes to Standing Orders and changes to the Bill to ensure some process for Parliament to sift, or to have sifted on its behalf and then reported to it, all the proposed amendments to existing EU legislation incorporated or saved under clauses 3 and 4, and indeed any others.
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Further, I understood my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General to have said that this sifting process will enable us to stratify between those changes that are minor and technical in character, which I suspect will be
around 99% of the many hundreds of changes that are required; those that are material but not fundamental, which might be susceptible, for example, to affirmative resolution statutory instruments as a means of alteration, or indeed of addressing deficiencies, because I take the valid point made by my hon. and learned Friend that, in some cases, what is concerning to parliamentary draftsmen, Ministers and the Treasury Solicitor and so on is the ability to fill in deficiencies should they arise; and those in a third category, which are fundamental, some of which have been the subject of the more serious observations made by Opposition Members and by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), which have to do, for example, with fundamental rights in employment, the environment, health and safety or whatever, where clearly it is part of the point of leaving the EU that the House and the other place should have the ability to make changes that are not now feasible, but where those changes should, equally clearly, go through the full process of primary legislation.
If that is what my hon. and learned Friend was saying, I have to say that I think it is a good way to resolve a series of issues, most of which arise in relation to clauses 3 and 4, but which will also arise in relation to other—