My Lords, I support the Bill and will try to be very brief, because it is a very brief Bill and my support for it is very strong—not least because it is very brief. We all owed the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, thanks for her services to this House before the Bill; we now owe a bit more to her in the light of it.
It is a manifest absurdity that the maximum penalty that can be imposed on somebody who breaks the rules of this place varies in inverse proportion to the length of the Parliament. It is absurd—the scale of the penalty should reflect the scale of the offence, not the remaining period of the Parliament. It is Alice in Wonderland.
I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury. His speech was important, because I feared before this debate that we would hear that this was not the only reform that needed to be undertaken and that we would get into the trap of letting the best become the enemy of the good. I, too, believe that we need to have more reforms of this place, but that should not be an excuse for delaying this self-evident correction of a self-evident absurdity.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, for warning against letting the best become the enemy of the good. I hope that what has been expressed from the Liberal Democrat Benches will also be expressed from the Government Front Bench. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is absolutely right to say that there is no reason at all why this very sensible, long-overdue, necessary little reform should not be on the statute book before the end of this Parliament.
I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, who raised a point that I believe he has raised before, but in terms that indicated that he realised that it did not require an amendment to this enabling Bill and could be dealt with perfectly well in the Standing Orders that would follow.
I am going to deliver on my promise of brevity. I hope that the discussions in this House will be equally brief and that we will bring this Bill to a successful conclusion before the end of this Parliament.
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