My Lords, I see that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, is in his place. I would like to say that he was sorely missed this afternoon, but unfortunately I cannot—we did not miss him at all. I can see that his popping in occasionally in the afternoon to this House of concord and agreement must be a pleasure, away from the hell of the Brexit department. It is good to see him. I do not know whether it was my eloquence or the fact that a former Lord Chief Justice—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge—applied his powerful arguments, but we welcome the Government’s concession.
I will not go into a great deal of detail on Amendment 33A. I will read out the section we want to delete:
“Regulations may make provision generally for carrying this Act into effect and for achieving the purpose set out in section 1(1)”.
Subsection 1 is equally catch-all. It states:
“This Act has effect for the purpose of regulating—(a) space activities, (b) sub-orbital activities, and (c) associated activities, carried out in the United Kingdom”.
That is far too wide-reaching.
I make one last plea to the Minister: perhaps we could have further talks involving the opposition—the Official Opposition as well, who put their names to this—to see whether we can get some different wording. We have done a lot of good work on this, but the
wording is far too wide. I give her this Gypsy’s warning: if we send the Bill down to the other place with this subsection, it will cause just the same trouble. Parliament has to be very jealous of its privileges during the passage of Bills such as this. This is a bridge too far for anyone who cares about the need to keep powers within these two Houses. I am not going to press the amendment—it would be jarring to the spirit of the whole debate to have a Division at this stage—but if the Minister would agree to meet us and have one more go before Third Reading, that would be helpful.