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Flood and Water Management Bill

That is certainly so, but the existence of statutory functions means that Parliament has reached a position on the wisdom of those provisions. That is why negative resolutions, which are referred to repeatedly in past legislation, are sometimes debated when an issue is of sufficient salience—but most often of less significance—so long as they are brought before Parliament and properly identified and examined. I speak as a veteran of the Opposition. Each day we had a very limited team who had to collect the list of statutory instruments, which I always seemed to think was a little longer than my arm, and within two days shadow Ministers were expected to have a clear idea of whether they should take action. Mercifully, as members of the Opposition will know only too well, in well over 95 per cent—perhaps 99.9 per cent—of cases, such action is not required. However, the list is absolutely enormous because the issues have already been considered by Parliament. If we were laying down functions that were not statutory, we would have recognised the argument for having an affirmative procedure. That is why we have the negative procedure here and I am sure that that is right.