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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

The difficulty is that we cannot reflect fully in the time before the Bill leaves the House of Commons. I find myself in the slightly embarrassing position of supporting what the Liberal Democrats have said. At a meeting, the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) and I urged that view on the then Minister, and I think that it has considerable merit. Of course I accept that we cannot normally allow minority vetoes on the processes of the House or on ordinary parliamentary procedure, but yesterday I accepted new clause 19—reluctantly, as did my hon. Friend—as a step in the right direction. I was prepared to allow some flexibility in abandoning parliamentary procedure for non-controversial measures. Surely, though, if 65 Members say that a measure merits being subject to the full parliamentary process, it is not a non-controversial deregulatory measure. If we were in office, I would take the view that even if the 65 were shell-backed left-wing members of the Labour party with a stray Welsh Nationalist added, they would be entitled to the full parliamentary process, and to be allowed to veto a short-cutting of the whole parliamentary procedure, which we are all prepared to contemplate only in the case of genuinely non-controversial deregulatory measures.