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Coroners and Justice Bill

I am somewhat intrigued by these amendments, which we are told are minor and technical. In my experience, references to "the Secretary of State" in any legislation refer simply to "the Secretary of State" on the basis that "the Secretary of State" is a single legal entity. You then infer from the Act which Secretary of State it is. So, in my days in education, when we were passing education Bills, when the Bill said "the Secretary of State", that meant the Secretary of State for Education. Later, under this Government, what was the Department of Education started changing its name with monotonous regularity. If we had put in the words "the Secretary of State for Education", every time a new education Bill came through, further drafting amendments would presumably have had to be made to a whole host of bits of legislation, suggesting that his or her name should be changed to whatever the Government had decided that that department should now be called. This has happened in this case because the Government started by saying "the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform", which is a pretty silly title anyway, and now want to change it to the almost sillier title of "the Secretary of State for Business, Innovations and Skills". We understand that that also includes universities, but for some reason they did not want to add that to the title. Anyway, on this occasion we are told that we will have the full title of the Secretary of State. Perhaps the Minister can assist me. It might be because, on this occasion, we have in Clause 100(3)(a), ""the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, acting personally"." Well, if he is acting personally, one might have gone further. Rather than giving his title, we could have used a whole raft of titles, such as "Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the county of Durham, Lord President of the Council, Secretary of State, Deputy Prime Minister"—the whole lot. I honestly do not know. Put simply, can the Minister tell us why we cannot have just "the Secretary of State", as we have always had in the past? When does the Minister expect to seek to amend the Bill further when the Prime Minister changes the title of that department again? Is this an appropriate way to go about things? If the Minister is going to suggest that the clause stays as it is, might this be one of those occasions where we have a new regulation-making power—it could even be negative; I would not even insist that it be affirmative—so that we could change the title as appropriate by means of negative instruments?