I thank the Minister for his responses. I am sure that he would not say that he found himself in a difficult situation, since he has had no responsibility for the Home Office’s failures to which we have referred and which were referred to in the committee’s report. I am very grateful to him for making it clear that if there are further failures by the Home Office, the responsibility rests fair and square on the shoulders of Ministers. It is just not good enough to turn up in front of a committee or to make statements that somehow it is due to an administrative failure, which by implication means that they are passing the buck on to officials. Ministers gave assurances; Ministers are responsible for seeing that those assurances are kept and, if they are not, it is only Ministers who are responsible and accountable for that. They should be prepared to accept that responsibility if they have to appear in front of the committee again, and not seek to say words which imply that somebody else within the department at a lower than ministerial level is somehow responsible.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for their contributions to this debate and for the issues they raised, along with the questions they asked and to which the Minister has had to respond. I say in closing only that my motive in tabling this Motion, apart from raising my specific questions, is that we have some duty when we see such a report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee to make sure that it is debated. I do not think that the committee is prone to making such critical comments and observations about a department—and, in this instance, its failure—every five minutes. I think it really would have to be pushed to feel moved to write its fourth and
fifth reports in the vein that it did. I will leave it at that and thank everyone who has participated. I thank the Minister again for his responses and, since this is a take-note Motion, I take it that this Committee agrees to take note of the Motion.