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Liaison Committee: Third Report

My Lords, I certainly was not trying to be contemptuous of the noble Lord, Lord Winston—rather the opposite; I was impressed by the number of scientists who had spoken. I am sorry that the noble Lord misunderstood me, or maybe I did not express myself well. As the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said, it is a question of resources. We cannot continue to spend more and more money. In this report we have recommended one additional unit of committee activity—I know that the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, does not like that phrase but it describes rather well what we do—and the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, mentioned how we had followed the recommendations of the Goodlad committee. We are going to have two pre-legislative scrutiny committees, one more than we have at the moment; one post-legislative scrutiny committee—I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, about adoption, and obviously if something develops on that we can review the subject later on—and two brand new ad hoc committees on topical subjects. I think that that is what the House wanted. It would be even better if we could just go on with the old committees as well, but it would be irresponsible of our committee to continually recommend more and more. On the point about the European Union Committee, we will still have six sub-committees and a main committee so there will be seven committees in action in that area. They will still be better resourced than most, if not all, such sub-committees in other EU national parliaments. We were grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Roper, for coming to see us and explaining things. We had intended to be helpful in telling him roughly what we thought, and we had intended that he would therefore know what to expect and what to argue. We also did not want committees to plan work beyond the end of the Session that they would then have to alter. Indeed, the noble Lord persuaded us not to reduce the size of the EU Committee to five but to keep it at six. I had thought that it was the European Union Committee's desire that the membership of the sub-committees should go up from 12 to 14; that is the impression that we on the committee were given. If that is not the case, though, it is only—