It is always an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Lindsay.
I support the new clause. It has the overwhelming support of the parties here and of the Select Committee, which has been rightly identified as the Committee that should try to organise the scrutiny. I approve of the requirement in the new clause that the Secretary of State should bear in mind
“any relevant recommendations made by any select committee of the House”.
A number of points were made on Second Reading but, in particular, Members asked where the evidence came from and on what we were basing this, and my hon. Friend the Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) asked whether we could see the material. Yesterday was the first time that I, and many of my colleagues, were able to see the material on which tonight’s discussion is based. I have it in my hand. There is not a lot of it: it contains 300 words and three graphs. On the basis of a 300-word document with three graphs, we are being asked to agree a multi-million-pound subsidy cut in Northern Ireland. That is not right.
This requires scrutiny. Those 300 words may have convinced some people, and the Minister made a very good fist of making the case, but they are not a compelling argument. We need to be able to see the evidence that has convinced the Department that it is doing right and the rest of the United Kingdom is doing wrong, and that, if the Irish Republic comes on stream, it too will be doing wrong. We need to see the evidence for those claims.
I asked a few questions that need to be answered by the Secretary of State or her senior officials. That can happen only in a Committee, because they have not been answered on Second Reading, and I do not know if they will be answered in Committee. I welcome the
new clause that has been tabled by colleagues; I hope that it attracts support and that the Secretary of State can demonstrate to us, if she does not want us to accept it, that she will take cognisance of what a Committee will say and of scrutiny that will actually take place.