I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I know the Committee will not believe this but the three noble Lords I most want to thank are the noble Lords, Lord True and Lord Faulks, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard. I thank the noble Lord, Lord True, for raising my spirits. I love the words “Labour Government”; I will use them again and again. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, because sometimes when you know what you are talking about, you assume that everyone else does. I had got something wrong and it was not clear. I was not talking about how, under this Bill, the current EU rules will be put into legislation by statutory instruments. We are content with that. We will in due course argue about whether the relevant word should be “necessary” or “appropriate”, but that is not the purpose of this amendment. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, for giving me the opportunity to say that.
The purpose of the amendment is about looking way into the future and future-proofing what we are putting into UK legislation and to make sure that it cannot then be tampered with by means of statutory instruments. It is not about the current work that many of our colleagues on the statutory instruments committee are about to undertake. We are talking about the future. I again thank the noble Viscount for giving me the opportunity to discuss that.
I say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, that I said at the beginning of this discussion that we would come on to how we deal with the bigger issues involved in this matter. However, today, I want to discuss the human, environmental and consumer rights that we sometimes risk losing sight of when we get into the technicalities of law and how we are going to hold on to those. As I said, I absolutely accept that we may deal with the technicalities later.
The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, said that certain bits of retained EU law could possibly be dealt with by statutory instruments and others by primary legislation. Elsewhere in the Bill judges are allowed to deal with measures on a case-by-case basis. But in the case of
retained EU law, we have a difficulty as I think he said that he was happy for the Government to decide which measures could be dealt with by secondary legislation. Perhaps that is the nub of the problem.