My Lords, in view of the remarks made by my noble friend the Minister in his intervention in the speech of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, saying that he intends to accept the principle of Amendment 9, I can be a good deal briefer than I would otherwise have been. Broadly, I felt after the discussion in Committee and subsequent consideration—particularly after the discussions with Mr Dunne—that it would be very important to get in the Bill the assurances about the material that the Government would produce before a decision was made on the affirmative order. That, of course, was a government amendment that was introduced in Committee after representation from a number of us that a decision should be made by affirmative order and that one could not just use Part 1 of the Bill without any further parliamentary consideration.
I believe that the situation here is the right way for us to proceed. The super-affirmative procedure to which the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has just referred
was discussed in some detail in Committee, and I initially saw some advantage in having a mechanism whereby one could look at this more carefully. On further examination, I took to heart the Minister’s view that this was rather a heavy way of tackling the problem, and that it would be possible for Parliament to be properly informed so that the debate on the affirmative order could be effective and efficient with the sort of procedures that are in Amendment 9. I therefore believe that Amendments 10 and 11 are too elaborate and that the lighter proposal in Amendment 9 is the one that the House, in principle, ought to accept, although of course we will be doing that at Third Reading rather than today.