My Lords, I shall speak briefly to support the spirit of the amendment in the names of the noble Earls, Lord Dundee and Lord Kinnoull, and to endorse what the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, said. The noble Earl referred to the Calman commission, on which he and I served and were charged specifically with looking at intergovernmental and interparliamentary co-operation. We found that there was much to be done. It came down to simple things such as passes for Members of the Scottish Parliament to access the Palace of Westminster and MPs to access the Scottish Parliament. There is much more that can be done.
I make only two further points, because there is a lot in the amendment that should give us impetus. Legislation cannot do it on its own; a culture requires to be built up as well. First, I wanted to pick up on,
“the sharing of examples of best practice between the Scottish institutions and United Kingdom institutions”,
in subsection (2)(c) of the proposed new clause. I have always believed that it is one of the potential strengths of the devolution settlement that we have in the United Kingdom that we not only have a United Kingdom Parliament that deals with England and in some cases England and Wales on otherwise devolved matters but we have Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland legislation. There is much that we can do to learn from each other. There are things that might have been tried that did not work which there is no point in repeating elsewhere. For example, the Scottish Parliament took the lead on the ban on smoking in public places, which other devolved institutions then followed. But the sharing of best practice has probably been patchy at best.
Secondly, the Bill does not allow this proposal to go beyond the terms of the amendment, but clearly it is not just about interchange and exchange between the United Kingdom institutions and the Scottish institutions—it is something that we will want to do for the Welsh and Northern Ireland institutions as well. We can all learn from each other, but I hope that the House will endorse the spirit of the amendments that have been tabled.