Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill (Programme) (No. 3)

It really will not do for the Minister of State to open this debate by saying how much he agrees with the Opposition about the inadequacy of the timetable for the Bill. I do not take, and never have taken, the reflex view that all timetable motions are of necessity inadequate for the purposes of the House. However, I do say that if the House is prepared to forgo its responsibility to consider some of the most basic legislation that we are here to consider—criminal law—and to sub-contract it to the other place to do the job that we are supposed to do, all the guff about the primacy of the House of Commons and how important this place is as a debating Chamber means absolutely nothing. These are matters of life and liberty and we are being asked to pass them on the nod because of a timetable exercise by the Whips, against the interests of the Department that leads on the Bill. We are asked to believe that there is no time in January, in a Session that started in November, to find a second day for a Bill that comprises two volumes, 176 clauses and 34 schedules, and to which hundreds of substantive amendments have been tabled today. Many of us could have tabled many more amendments if we had felt that there was the slightest chance that they would be considered. We are being asked to agree that the House of Commons cannot find the time to discuss criminal law properly and to pass it, without consideration, to the other place. The hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) has already said that many new clauses—which were not in the original published Bill—were introduced in Committee, often at short notice. Since then, we have had whole new provisions introduced, some of which we are seeing for the very first time today. They are not trivial matters, because they include provisions that affect the governance of our prisons, the basic law of self-defence, the terms for recall of prisoners and public protection. Those are not trivial, but even if none of them had been introduced today, I question whether it is right that the House should be given a mere few hours to deal with fundamental issues such as homophobic hatred crime. Parallel offences were discussed for days and days, but today we are expected to dispose of the provision in a matter of minutes. Repeal of the law of blasphemy is an important issue on which the House is entitled to have an opinion. People are concerned to make sure that we get right the law on prostitution, both to reduce the incidence of prostitution and to avoid the trafficking of women and men for the purposes of prostitution. However, we may not even have the opportunity to debate those measures. The Bill introduces what could be termed a Sarah's law or Megan's law. It would certainly be an important change to our criminal procedure in protecting children against those who have been found guilty of sexual offences against minors. We may not have a chance to say a word about those proposals because of the timetable. There are to be huge changes to the role of the Court of Appeal, and we are being asked simply to pass the issue down the corridor; the attitude is, ““The Lords will sort out the Court of Appeal. It is not for the Members of the House of Commons to have an opinion about its role in the judicial process.”” We are talking about an abuse of the House, made that much more difficult to stomach by the fact that the Lord Chancellor—I am sorry that he is not in the Chamber—told the Commons when he was Leader of the House how important it was that we respected the House's role, the rights of Back Benchers to intervene in debate, and the importance of Report as a part of the legislative process in which the whole House had the opportunity to debate matters that would otherwise be considered only by members of a Committee. That same Leader of the House was to reform and improve the House's procedures, to make it capable of doing the work entrusted to it. It is he who puts before us today an abuse of process that will prevent us from doing our work. It means that eventually we will have to rely on an unelected House to do the work that we should do. That is quite wrong. The Minister of State knows that I have argued from day one that this is a big Bill that needs proper consideration. He knows that, whenever possible, I have tried to argue that we need sufficient time for Report. The answer is wholly inadequate. It will not do, and I hope that the House will, for once, take it upon itself to do its job properly by rejecting the programme motion.