Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

With great respect to the noble Lord, I am inviting the Committee to accept that whatever the Bill is at the end of proceedings in this House and in Parliament as a whole, it is vital to have at the outset a statement of constitutional principle. This amendment is entirely without prejudice to all the amendments that we will be debating, considering, and perhaps voting on, many of which I support, but that is an entirely distinct question from the issue that we are now debating, which is the constitutional principle about what goes into the Bill. I was particularly grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for his support on this point, and I respectfully agree with what he said. I am not going to test the opinion of the House today—I am going to take the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree—but I very much hope that the Minister will be able without a vote to recognise that the opinion of the House is very strongly in favour of this amendment for all the reasons that have been expressed in Committee today. I am sure that the Minister will recognise that if there is no movement on this issue—an issue that I and many other noble Lords regard as absolutely fundamental—the House will return to this matter on Report, and it is clear, I suggest, that the Minister and the Government will face a substantial rebellion on their own Benches. For the present, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 1 withdrawn. Amendment 2 Moved by