My Lords, I was happy to add my name to Amendment 14 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. People keep apologising for not being lawyers, but I think it is time a lawyer apologised for being a lawyer. I am a lawyer and I want to say this. It is commonly said by judges up and down the country that words in a statute should be like a piece of crystal—absolutely clear and unambiguous. They should be clear, unambiguous and definitive, but the word “normally” has no fixed meaning at all. I looked it up in a number of dictionaries. In one, the first definition of “normally” was “rectangular”—I do not know where that takes us.
We use a lot of elastic words from time to time, such as “reasonable”, “appropriate”, “usually” or “a piece of string”. There is no clear meaning or definition to these words, but the difference between a word in a statute and a convention is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Lang, said, a convention is fluid and flexible. You can develop it all the time in the light of experience—qualify it, extend it and so on—but you cannot do that with the words of a statute. My problem is that I do not know what a court would make of the word “normally”.