My Lords, we can already see this evening what will be the Government’s formula to get these statutory instruments through: they will produce them at 12 minutes past midnight, put forward the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, to propose them, and then they will go through on the nod with nobody daring to protest and us all thinking that it was the best possible thing that could happen.
The real danger facing us is not the procedure; I think we can get too hung up on that. In particular, I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, when he said that there was great constitutional tension caused by the rejection of the tax credits orders. The crucial thing to remember about that rejection is that the Government accepted it immediately—they did not seek to reverse the rejection in the Commons because they knew that they did not have the majority for it in the Commons. It was a legitimate use of your Lordships’ role, which is to require the House of Commons to think again. What in fact happened, under the smokescreen of the Strathclyde report, was that the Government were forced to think again, they did not have a majority and they backed down.
The real issue with these regulations, which no one has an answer to because we are in such unprecedented circumstances, is not the precise procedure—although it is better to have an affirmative procedure than a negative one for issues of consequence—but the volume of orders that will hit us. It is going to be colossal, given the scale of law that has to be transposed and
the amount of consequential legislation that is going to follow in the process of transposing it. Nothing that I have heard in our consideration so far gives me any reassurance at all that we are going to be able to cope with the sheer volume of it—unless the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, with his great skill in these matters, manages to ensure that all these orders come before the House between midnight and 4 am, when they will be proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and will all go through without us really realising what has happened, under a kind of parliamentary anaesthetic, which she does such a good job of imposing on us all.