Absolutely. Those commitments will be important and consequential, but we also need to ensure that everything gets baked properly into the Standing Orders and that the relevant votes are passed correctly.
Moving on to scope, I think still we still have further to travel. A whole slew of amendments—not just the three or four tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield that I have put my name to, but those of the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and others—are trying to address the scope of the powers that Ministers will be given. In fact, Ministers themselves have accepted the principle, saying that they are sympathetic to the idea of trying to limit the scope of the powers. The Minister said that both he and the Secretary of State would like to do that if they could; it seemed to be a question of how, not whether it was desirable in principle.
When I tempted the Minister in an intervention, he also said that the view in the Department is that Ministers want to try to take just enough powers to successfully translate EU laws into British laws and no more. We all accept that there must be no less than the minimum required, but he was clear that Ministers only want to take the minimum. The question is not about the principle of necessity and sufficiency; it is about how that is translated into a legal wording that will allow the principle to be clearly expressed. I gently, but I hope forcefully, say to Ministers that the words in the Bill at the moment do not pass the sniff test for an awful lot of us in the Chamber.
I am extremely pleased, therefore, with the open, positive and constructive way in which Ministers have approached the issue and with the commitment from the Dispatch Box this afternoon to go back and have a further look. I could not tempt the Minister into a firm promise to introduce an amendment, but I think that that is going to be necessary by the time we get to Report if the Bill is to be amended in a way that becomes acceptable and passes the sniff test for most of us here.
The Minister was saying—I paraphrase him—that Ministers accept the principle that the minimum necessary, the necessity test, is the right one in principle, but they cannot find the right words because if they use the word “necessary”, and they have multiple necessities, the courts will interpret that in a way that is unhelpful and does not deliver what everyone wants. The problem Ministers have is that the word that they have chosen instead of “necessary” is too broad and brings in all sorts of other possibilities that give a great deal of concern around the House that Ministers will
unintentionally but in practice introduce other powers that they have said this afternoon they do not desire, need or want to give themselves in principle.