Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

My hon. Friend has come to a very important point—it is the third point that I want to make, but I will deal with it now—about Lords amendment No. 2, which states:"““If, on a review under this section, it appears to the Secretary of State appropriate to do so, the Secretary of State may by order made by statutory instrument provide that the Commission is to cease to be a Crown body… An order under subsection (6) may…make any amendment to Schedule 1 that appears to…be necessary or expedient””," and it may apply the transfer of undertakings regulations, and so on. So if the Minister decides in three years' time that he wants to change great chunks of the Bill, he can do so in a little Committee upstairs, as my hon. Friend says, without the full and proper scrutiny that the staff would expect, that we expect and that the British public are entitled to expect. That is a hole-in-the-corner way of doing things. My hon. Friend thinks that I am slightly overstating my case—I got the mood of his comments—but Parliament should feel passionate about the annoying fact that such important decisions, which affect millions of people in the way that the child support arrangements do and which affect important civil service staff who are entitled to expect Ministers to stick up for them and to treat them decently, should be dealt with unconstitutionally. That is my view.