---

European Union Bill

My Lords, perhaps I may detain the House for a minute or two to comment on the speeches that noble Lords have just made. As we understand it, it is the operations of the usual channels that have resulted in such peculiar anomalies—if I may call them that—in the conduct of the Bill. On the previous two days in Committee, we had extraordinary groupings. I know that Members on the Cross Benches were as perplexed as we were about how those groupings had been determined, and there was consensus across the House that they had not worked very well. We were then told last Thursday that there was going to be an additional day in Committee—today. In other words, if the House had not sat on Friday, we would not even have had one working day’s notice. It was simply a coincidence that the House sat on Friday and that we therefore had one working day’s notice. We were led to believe that that was agreed among the usual channels and that in fact the opposition Benches of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, had requested the extra day today. However, from the tone of the debate, it sounds as though that may not have been the case. I hope that my noble friends on the government Front Bench will bear in mind that, if we are to have serious scrutiny on the Bill, as we all want, and time to prepare seriously for that serious scrutiny, we require slightly more notice than we were given on this occasion, and we require slightly more attention to be paid to the way in which the Bill has been conducted to date.