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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I ask the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, to clarify one aspect of his argument for me, because I am genuinely puzzled by it. The noble Lord is an experienced lawyer, who has been in this House for a dozen years and seen a great amount of legislation flow through it. He refers several times to the notion that somehow a super-affirmative resolution removes the power from this House, but nothing removes the power from this House as much as its inability to legislate in situations in which there is clear abuse and the very nature of our legislative process makes it impossible to move with sufficient alacrity to deal with issues. I should have thought that it was much better to work on and improve the process of the super-affirmative resolution to the point at which it becomes a very useful instrument for this House, knowing full well that the process of introducing primary legislation into your Lordships’ House is tortuous. The noble Lord has been here a long time, so how much time would he guess it takes to take a problem, turn it into primary legislation and get it through this House? It is probably something like two and a half years. In a fast-moving environment such as the one we are dealing with in relation to the entire Bill, two and a half years is a lifetime. Whether a super-affirmative resolution is right or not, we have to find a better, more effective, more efficient and speedier way of dealing with the kind of problem that the Bill overall is attempting to address.