My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, on clearly laying out the issues in this group. I largely agree with almost everything that has been said. In fact, I put my name to Amendment 63 not only because I thought it was a good amendment but because the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, looked a little bit lonely there, so I thought I would support him even though we are not natural allies on almost anything.
I am not really one for rules and regulations—I tend to kick against that sort of regimentation—but I am essentially rather law-abiding, so I have quite honestly been absolutely horrified by this Government. They are breaking the law: they are actually sending two Bills to your Lordships’ House in which they ask us specifically to break the law. I just think that that is dreadful. Parliament is actually recognised as the unwritten British constitution; it is the will and the voice of the people. We could make Parliament more democratic, but the Government are actually saying that they do not want to. They are almost saying: “Well, the discretion of Ministers is as good as anything.” No, it is not; that is absolutely laughable. It sidesteps parliamentary scrutiny in the most horrendous way. We cannot let the government majority in the Commons absolve the Government of any meaningful scrutiny. We have to scrutinise and we have to be tough.
I very much hope that, when it comes to Report, we can pull a lot of these ideas together and ensure that we send them back to the Commons and make it clear that we are actually scrutinising in a way that MPs really ought to be but are not. From my point of view, we have to embed binding scrutiny into the Bill and we have to make the MPs feel, I hope, a little bit shamed if they do not support it.
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