Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am sorry to resort to the text of new schedule 1, but my hon. Friend will see that it sets out the relevant categories of information—communications with the sovereign, the heir and the second heir. The key word is "communications", which covers a wide range of information. I believe that it is appropriate that it should. [Interruption.] I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister of State, who has handed me a note stating that the provision applies also to those acting on behalf of the relevant members of the royal family, which I said in my opening remarks. It took me a bit of time to catch up with the news that the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) is going to leave the House, and I am sorry that he is. I made my point about the veto in an intervention on him. I sometimes think that people want to pick and mix the Freedom of Information Act. It is a very tough Act, and notwithstanding the criticisms as it was going through the House that it was no better than the non-statutory information code, it has transformed the public's right to know about what public authorities do and changed the behaviour of national and local government. It is not an à la carte menu, it is a single whole, and as I have said before, the section 53 power is as essential a part of it as the public interest test exceptions in section 2. It is better and more substantial than most comparable freedom of information Acts in the world, including that in Australia. We are simply maintaining the status quo with respect to Northern Ireland. We did not ask the Northern Ireland Assembly whether it wanted us to do that, because there was not anything in particular to ask it since we were not changing anything. It will remain open to the Assembly to pass its own freedom of information legislation relating to its own areas of business if it wants to bring it into line with what is happening in this House. That seems an appropriate way to proceed. I understand the anxiety of my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), but neither the Information Commissioner nor the Information Tribunal allow the text of the Freedom of Information Act to be used more widely than the provisions in it state. If anybody attempts to use the exemptions in it too widely, they have to get past first the Information Commissioner and secondly the tribunal. If they are both blind to the fact that the provisions of the Act are being misused, there can be an appeal to the High Court on a point of law, as there has been. I am quite sure that the High Court would spot the error that was being made, even if the other two institutions had not done so.