Let us just get one thing straight: this is not a taxpayer subsidy. The taxpayer pays for holiday pay as well. Are we going to have a government Minister talking about that with regard to all those organisations, not just local government —we have already agreed that it may be charities or all sorts of other functions? They decide their own holiday pay, and the taxpayer pays for that, but facility time is somehow really different.
I shall not go through all the contributions, but I want to say three things. First, on the affirmative procedure, Parliament knows best—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord King, who mentioned that. But the problem is, as the Minister says, that this legislation went through the Commons without any difficulty, which is how an affirmative resolution would go through the Commons. When the legislation comes here, the only place where we can say stop, we have the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, saying that we must not overturn a statutory instrument—“I’ll do another report, we’ll clip your wings or we’ll put in another 100 Tory Peers”. What was the other thing he was going to do? Oh yes, he might suspend us, give us a permanent holiday. The idea that our safeguard is that we can overturn a statutory instrument here is no safeguard.
The Minister has said that this is a provision of last resort, but she has still not explained the criteria on which that last resort could be taken. The example given by the noble Lord, Lord King, is really frightening —if one thing has gone bad in one place, which could be a care home, or something, we will have the Dangerous Dogs Act again. Because something is really bad in one place and the public have got to know about it, therefore we will have a Minister saying that we have to do something about it so let us have a statutory instrument quickly, and a whole category will be caught because of one example of something going wrong. The real issue is whether it is about, as the noble Lord, Lord King, says, one or two or three examples of where this is going wrong, or is it some other reason that we have not heard from the Minister? What criteria would bring in this power of last resort? This is a question for management and local authorities, or whoever the employer will be—Magnox, or all those other organisations that we have been through. It is really not for Ministers. We will return to this one, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.