I know from my previous experience that His Majesty’s Government will observe the Sewel convention in relation to this. There may be occasions on which, for simplicity, the devolved authorities want the Westminster Parliament to move ahead with something
on which everybody agrees, but what is devolved is devolved and the devolved Administrations will have the right to pursue it.
This Bill is not only one of constitutional importance that will get our statute book tidied up but one of massive opportunity. It presents an opportunity, not necessarily to do any one big individual thing—like the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which can change Solvency II involving billions of pounds for the economy—but to go through every single individual issue in detail, one by one, so that we can see, bit by bit, those rules that have made our businesses less competitive, those regulations that have put our businesses under more pressure and those intrusions that have made people’s lives less easy. We will be able to sweep those away, and we will be doing so in a proper constitutional process.