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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

I am intrigued by the notion expounded by the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) that ridiculing Ministers causes them to be sacked. In my experience, they get promoted or retain their salaries when their jobs are taken away. However, he clearly knows more about that than I. We are dealing with one of the three most important elements in the Bill. Yesterday, I set out the three ways to secure some safety with the proposals. I said that that could be done by prescription of what could be dealt with by the Bill, by proscription of what could not be so dealt with, and by protection—that is, using the safeguards available to the House to influence the use of procedure. This group of amendments is entitled ““Parliamentary veto””, but that is an unfortunate misnomer. A better alternative might be ““Parliamentary caveat””, as we are certainly not talking about Parliament vetoing what the Government propose. We have heard a great deal about the value of ministerial assurances and a Select Committee of the House was assured, right at the start of our consideration of the Bill, that there would be a Select Committee veto on proposals. The former Minister, who is now Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, originally thought that that mechanism was already in the Bill. It was gently pointed out to him that that was not the case, but he seemed to retain that misapprehension even as the Committee stage began. Eventually, he promised that it would be brought in later. The tenor of the Government’s response to the quite proper criticism of the Bill voiced by hon. Members of all parties has been that the Select Committee structure would have primacy in the procedural arrangements. It therefore bodes very badly for the exercise of the powers in the Bill that Ministers are not prepared, even now, to accept the recommendations of the Procedure Committee or of the Regulatory Reform Committee. The members of those Committees have great knowledge of these matters, but their proposals were not adopted by Ministers when they put forward their amendments.