I thank my noble friend for his elegant and succinct summary of this long SI. I would like to ask a couple of questions. The first is about the enforcement of these fisheries rules. Page 14 has a reference to Article 23 and to projects involving “catches and discards” and so on. I remember from the time when I worked in the fisheries department, at what is now Defra, that enforcement of the rules is actually as important as the statutory framework itself. We are obviously moving from an EU-based system to a UK one, and in some cases to a devolved system. It may be beyond the reach of this SI, but can the Minister say anything reassuring about enforcement? Vessels will obviously come from other EU member states; they may not always be punctilious about discards and catches. Our own fishermen also need to be properly protected.
The second point is on the issue of errors, which we heard about in the previous debate and again here. Are any steps being taken, as part of the Brexit process and more generally, to minimise the amount of errors that there are in SIs? If an SI is wrong even in terms of
one spelling mistake, my recollection is that you have to re-lay it. I found this to be a problem when I was in the business department, so I took steps to make sure that the SIs did not come through with errors in them. “Right first time” is obviously a good principle. Can anything be done in that area to help? I am sure that we will have a lot more SIs as work on Brexit continues into the more detailed areas.