No, I am not. I cannot think of an example at the moment, but a number of Committee stages that would previously have been dealt with upstairs have been dealt with on the Floor of the House. That leads us to ask whether the Government are simply trying to fill up time on the Floor of the House—and I think that that is exactly what they have been doing.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, this is an important Bill, and it will clearly be given a great deal more scrutiny and attention in the other place than it will be given here. Given the current logjam in the other place, we shall have a very thin February and March
as we wait for Bills to return to us. There is also the broader issue of the reputation of the House of Commons. I do not think that headlines about, for instance, zombie Parliaments or MPs coming to the House on only two days a week do our reputation any good. We cannot expect the public to understand the minutiae of parliamentary timetabling, especially given the incompetent way in which the Government are handling it.