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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I beg to move, that the Bill be now read the Third time. As is customary on Third Reading, I thank all the members of the Standing Committee for what seemed to me, in my limited experience of the House, to be an informed, discursive and useful debate. We had plenty of time and all the necessary matters were considered in a spirit of reasonable discourse and, on the odd day, with some intellectual rigour. Our sittings were extremely useful and productive, as is right and proper given that the Bill deals with a range of extremely serious matters in the context of an important political debate. That description applied even before the Government introduced—with agreement—the counter-terrorism clauses after the Bill had been published. That was a most unusual way of proceeding, but the House in the main will understand why things happened that way. There was a significant degree of cross-party agreement on the process, if not on the substance of those clauses.