I am grateful to all the noble Lords who have spoken and to the Minister for his reply, apart from his reply to my noble friend Lord Skelmersdale in the last sentence. It is the case, despite the Minister’s assertions, that the items in Schedule 20 have not really been subject to scrutiny in any meaningful sense. I agree, of course, that we have now taken up more than three minutes of parliamentary time by discussing the items in Schedule 20, but we have not actually discussed or examined the items themselves in any detail. What we have discussed is whether they should be there in the first place, which is of course not the same thing.
The argument that interested parties essentially would have complained if they had found any faults—a kind of way of saying “The dog did not bark, so clearly these are okay”—makes me wonder, in a way, why we need any kind of parliamentary scrutiny or scrutiny by the Law Commission at all. We could just say “The dog has barked” or not and carry on that way. I do not think that that would work. On waiting for interested dogs—or interested parties—to bark there are, of course, interested parties but the difference between them and the Law Commission is that the Law Commission is precisely not an interested party.
In closing, there are some questions that the Minister did not answer. Perhaps I could persuade him to write to me, in particular about departmental processes, which are at the heart of the matter, the processes that these proposals have gone through and how those processes in fact impact with the processes that the Law Commission itself would use. It would be very helpful to know how those compared.
The real question, however, and I do not think that the Minister touched on this at all, is one that I asked twice, which is: “Why the rush?”. I do not understand why we have to rush this when we know that the Law Commissions could do this in between four and 12 months.