Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

My Lords, I am glad that the Minister noticed the word ““effluxion””. Your Lordships may remember that she was keen to remind us in Committee that ““thinks that”” had been adopted rather than ““is satisfied that”” on the ground that it was always preferable to use plain English. So I took the trouble to look up the word ““effluxion””. I did so first in the Oxford School Dictionary. It includes 30,000 words, which is a vocabulary slightly larger than most of us command, but the word was not there. Roget’s Thesaurus contains it, alongside a number of alternatives which the parliamentary draftsmen no doubt looked at and discarded. The noble Baroness suggested that we might use ““passage””. In legal language, ““effluxion of time”” normally means the expiration of a lease or option or some other right due to passage of time, rather than due to a specific event that might cause the right to be extinguished, such as the destruction of a building. I do not think that its use has so far been extended to the immigration laws. Perhaps this would be a good opportunity to prevent it from spreading all over the statute book by referring to the OED. The meaning that the OED gives is,"““lapse or passing away (of time)””." I suggest that ““lapse”” ought to replace ““effluxion”” not only here, but in the several other places in this Bill where it occurs, as well as in other parts of the statute book that have been polluted by use of words other than plain English.