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Banking Bill

I would be the last person to deny the opportunity for the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, to participate in an exciting debate and I assure him that he will get that opportunity. The code will be laid before Parliament and those who are excited by it and want to organise a debate on it either in the other place or here will be more than entitled to do so. The issue is whether it should be mandatory that it be laid before the House. First, let us be grateful for the progress represented by the code under the Bill. I look around me and see enough noble Lords present who have sat through the passage of Bills during which they have bemoaned the fact that a code of practice or conduct will be involved when they have not seen sight nor sound of the code because it has not been drafted until after the legislation has been produced—sometimes a considerable time after. Constant have been the complaints about the process that that situation has created. Here we have the noble Baroness freely congratulating the Government on the fact that considerable progress has been made on the draft code in both the consultation that led up to it and the draft code itself. We have had the benefit of that in informing debate on the Bill. We also intend the code to be published very soon after the Bill becomes an Act and for it to be laid before Parliament in order to provide opportunities of which Parliament may want to take advantage. That seems to indicate that the Government have taken the issue of consultation on the code and its importance in an exemplary way. I was rather hoping for plaudits from the opposition Benches, rather than criticism of the process. I understand the enormous advantages of secondary legislation by affirmative resolution. We all know that if every call on every piece of legislation was incorporated in Bills, Parliament would be submerged by those instruments which often—even when they are affirmative and therefore have extra status and significance attached to them because the Government are obliged to lay them—give rise to limited debates with limited participants, even on the most significant issues.