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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

Occasionally, that is so. I do not want to digress but my first experience here was to sit on a Committee considering a private Member’s Bill. We had a splendid Standing Committee sitting. People took good points from across the Committee and came to sensible agreements. The Bill came back to the Floor of the House and was killed off by the Government of the day, as though the Committee never took place. I thought naively that Bills were going to be discussed in the way in which that private Member’s Bill was discussed in that Committee. Of course, it was nothing of the kind. I think everyone recognises that we have to scrutinise legislation much better. That is why we have been anxious to develop, for example, draft scrutiny of Bills. The Government are to be commended for developing that further but they are also to be slightly chastised, as the number of draft Bills is beginning to fall off again. That was a major innovation in our achieving better scrutiny of Bills.