My Lords, this is very important and the noble Baroness is entirely justified in getting a little worked up about it. I spent 40 years, almost to the day, in the other place. I never had a ministerial office and I was always deeply suspicious of Ministers exercising arbitrary power and of any measure that extended the opportunity for Ministers to exercise such powers. My noble friend Lord Hailsham intervened in the debate earlier this week to remind me—not that I needed reminding—of the importance of the Back-Bencher. The Government must always be answerable to Parliament. Giving a Minister an extra arbitrary power, be it in ever such a small degree, enables them to evade answerability to the elected House.
We are fortunate to have committees—the Constitution Committee and the committee of which the noble Lords, Lord Lisvane and Lord Tyler, are members—that act as watchdogs on behalf of this House and Parliament. As this Bill leaves our House, which it will do in a month or two, and goes back to the Commons, it must have been tightened up in as many particulars as possible so as to guarantee as much power as possible to the elected House.