I rise on behalf of the Liaison Committee and the Justice Committee, both of which I chair, to speak to amendment (b), which I can do very much more briefly now that the
Justice Secretary has indicated that it will be accepted, although I need to explain why we tabled it. It takes something, as the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) said, to bring together on matters European the right hon. Gentleman and myself, whose views are not so different on these issues, and the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash). That arose from the way in which the Government have gone about this process, which is not the way that they said they would go about it. However, in two moves—in a two-step—over the past five days, the Government have sought to respond to our concerns, and I very much welcome that.
The original change that was made last week was specifically to endorse the role of Select Committees in considering the Government’s proposals as to which measures we should opt back into. The reason that we were not happy with the wording which then emerged, which was a considerable improvement on the Government’s first motion, was that it appeared to us that the words would restrict the Committees’ ability to argue for the inclusion of measures not on the list or the exclusion of measures that were on the list. Our understanding had been that specific confirmation of the list was a matter for the second debate and vote, after the Committees had considered the issues raised by the Government’s statement of what they were minded to do on the various opt-in possibilities.