Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

At least the position of those Members would be better than it would be if the new clause is not accepted. The hon. Gentleman, if I may say so, is making the best the enemy of the good. The purpose of the new clause is to make sure that in circumstances where the matter before the House is controversial in the minds of a sufficient number of Members, the full Bill procedure will be used. The main problem that we have had with the Bill all the way through is that Ministers have told the Committee that they did not intend to use the procedure for controversial matters, but they have not been prepared to offer any substantive definition of ““controversial””. That is why, to extract Ministers from that difficulty, Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches and in other parts of the House have tried to solve the problem procedurally. New clause 14 offers, in effect, a procedural definition of what is controversial. I cannot understand why the Government resist. They do so, presumably, because they do not want written into the Bill matters that could possibly become subject to judicial review. They want to protect themselves from the courts, but, with their own system of a Committee veto, they are offering a line of argument that may well lead to the Committees of the House being subject to exactly the same review in the courts. I find that to be precisely the wrong way round. It ought to be Ministers, more than Committees of the House or the House itself, who are subject to the courts.