Coroners and Justice Bill

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, says that it will be rather difficult for anyone to wind up a debate such as this. I look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, trying to do so in the time available after I have sat down. I start by being very kind to the noble Lord and congratulating him first on introducing this Bill—or, rather, this whole series of Bills—to the House, and then sitting through the entire debate. I remind the House that he is the only person in this House who has sat through every single speech—good luck to him—and who will have to wind it up at the end. Those are the last congratulations that I will offer him. I will not speak much to the merits of the Bill, because my noble friend Lord Kingsland set out our views—to the extent that he could on such a wide-ranging Bill—at the beginning of the debate. I shall concentrate on the process by which the Bill has been brought to us, because that has been of considerable concern to a large number of Peers who have spoken. This Bill is like the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill—that farce of a Bill that we had last year and that was first introduced in another place. Half its clauses were added to it on Report in another place, and then half of those clauses were removed in Committee in this place. We now have a Bill of equal size this year before this House—a Bill which, as many noble Lords have said, could be quite a number of different Bills. There are nine parts, 166 sections and 21 schedules. I think it was the former Lord Chancellor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, who implied that Lord Chancellors were judged by their weight, and by that I mean the weight of legislation they put through—