Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

This has been a crowded debate, albeit one that we started late. If I may say so without being thought impolite, it is a tribute to the good behaviour of Members who restricted themselves to the allotted 10 minutes or less that as many as 19 hon. Members have been able to speak. I am the 20th Member to contribute to the debate. I begin by inviting the Minister to clarify the mess on the Order Paper whereby the programme motion suggests that Committee proceedings will come to an end on 30 October. That might be welcome to many, but it would not do much good for the scrutiny process. I have some fairly strong reservations about this House's scrutiny proceedings in any event, but to close down scrutiny of this Bill on 30 October would be an error. I dare say that the Minister and the Government can sort out that mess. If they attempt to do so, we will endeavour to co-operate. Where we will not co-operate is in respect of the carry-over motion. We disapprove of a Bill of this importance and complexity being carried over. It should have been introduced at the beginning, not the end, of a parliamentary Session and it should have been granted the full rigour of a decent period of scrutiny unencumbered by a break and a new Session of Parliament. This is not only the umpteenth Bill from this Department or its predecessor, but it is wholly typical of Government legislation in this field—and perhaps in others—that we are presented with a Bill that has 84 pages of text relating to the main clauses and about 150 pages of schedules. If you want to understand what the Bill is really about, Mr. Speaker, I suggest that you read the schedules first and then perhaps look into some of the clauses at leisure. That way, you will make more sense of the Bill. If I may say so, the Bill is rather like a plum duff: there is an awful lot of duff and one or two plums. We will support the picking out of the plums, but we are very unhappy with the duff—and there is plenty of it. When presented with a delicious-looking pudding by his wife, Winston Churchill said that the pudding ““has no theme””. This Bill has no theme: it is muddled and confused. As the right hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Alun Michael) suggested, even though he was able to give it his support, it is a Bill that could do with rather greater concentration on what it is intended to do.