Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

It is indeed, and I am glad that the hon. Gentleman made that point. The Committee did its work well, and I paid tribute earlier, and I do so again, to the Ministers who went before it and to those who represented the Conservatives. We did our job as well as could be expected within the constraints of the Committee system, but the parliamentary system is supposed to be an iterative one. It is not supposed to be a system whereby Committee does it all and then something is rubber-stamped on Report in this Chamber. The Report stage is the opportunity for the wider House to have its say on issues that engage it, yet today's Report stage effectively started at 5.40 pm, because until then we were considering new measures. We were considering new Government proposals that the Committee had never considered, so this House was sitting as a rather inadequate committee for the first few hours of today's consideration of the Bill. We had just two hours to deal with what took the Committee many days to consider, and that is simply inadequate. It is also unfair, not only to the Members who came to this House this evening, some of whom were keen to debate issues that were of great importance to them and to their constituencies, but to the people outside this House whom we represent. I shall not go through all the areas that we did not touch upon, but the Bill contains vital measures. We have not had the opportunity to test on Report, on the Floor of this Chamber, matters that it is impossible to suggest are trivial. After all the years of controversy about how we protect the public against sex offenders who have been released—the multi-agency public protection arrangements and the so-called Sarah's law—I cannot believe that the Bill will have gone through without a word being said this evening on the subject. The House has had no opportunity to talk about a fundamental change in this country's public protection systems. The proposals on extreme pornography are controversial in some circles and will have an effect. People might be expected to be able to express a view on them, but again we have not had the opportunity to discuss them at all. I could also mention the prostitution issues. We know that Ministers are going to Sweden, and I believe that they are going to Holland too, so we are not simply looking at one country's experiences. I welcome that, because it is a sensible way of gathering evidence to see what might be a proper future response. If something is going to form part of this Bill, it is proper for this House to have the opportunity to debate it, yet, as we know, this House was prevented from doing so. The changes to the Court of Appeal are matters of fundamental legal substance. They are not a trivial matter or an afterthought that can simply be swept along. In passing this Bill to another place we will sub-contract our primary purpose as a House to an unelected House, so that it can do the work that we apparently cannot do. I find it offensive that we spend time talking about the primacy of this House of Commons but the Executive then treat it in this way. I am sorry if this is, to an extent, a continuation of our debate on the programme motion, but that is inevitable, because this seriously large and important Bill has received inadequate scrutiny. If we cannot say that on Third Reading, when can we say it? In a few moments, the Bill will have left this House and gone to another place for consideration. We will not have a similar opportunity to affect the shape of the Bill again. The House has failed in its duty. The Bill has its good points and its bad points. It is open to amendment, and we are now relying on those in another place to make those amendments for us. It would have been so simple for the Government to have provided another day of debate, which would have satisfied the House and the requirements of scrutiny and would not have thrown the Government's legislative programme into disarray.