My Lords, I hope that the noble Viscount will be kind enough to allow me to interpose very briefly. I support the thrust of Amendment 17 and certainly the aim that it seeks to achieve, but I have a couple of questions about the mechanisms that it proposes to do that. It proposes proceeding by resolution of each House. There are two issues. First, what happens if a straightforward approval Motion is amended and the final result is a resolution that overall approves an outcome but contains some sort of rider or condition? Regulating parliamentary proceedings by statute, in my experience, generally ends in some sort of tears. A question of whether the outcome met the requirements of the legislation could be resolved only by the courts, and that might not be a welcome result.
Secondly, what happens if one House comes to the required resolution but the other does not? Perhaps the solution is one that would endorse the sage advice given earlier by my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead which is to employ primary legislation, because that contains very well-understood mechanisms for securing agreement between the two Houses.