My Lords, as a Member of the Joint Committee I support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and commend him for the indefatigable way he has brought this issue back on Report. I can confirm that the Joint Committee was exercised about this failure, this deliberate resistance, by the Government to consider the Law Commission for all the reasons the noble Lord set out—transparency, reduction of risk and uncertainty and the opportunity to consider the repeals which were being recommended.
Let me take the House back to the first stages of this Bill, when there was something in the spirit of the original clause which was dropped from the eventual
Bill, whereby the Minister was going to take upon himself the power to decide which legislation was or was not redundant and to recommend that a whole swathe of legislation should actually disappear from the statute book. Such was the reaction to that that the clause was wisely dropped.
As to the attitude towards the Law Commission, I do not quite understand the difficulty. As the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, said, the Law Commission was absolutely clear that it would be able to deal with and expedite the passage of judgment on the repeals and it would give everyone the security of knowing that whatever was moved for repeal would have that additional scrutiny. That is not to cast aspersions on the ability of departments to make a judgment about what is or is not redundant legislation, but as we have got the Law Commission and that is part of its job, we should take advantage of that expertise and the scope to do that. On that basis, I certainly support the amendment.