I thank the Minister for that. The words, “Yes, Minister” came to mind. It was a very long, wordy way of saying no, but I suppose he had to say it. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Kakkar, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for their support and their speeches, as well as my noble friend Lord Hunt and other noble Lords. I particularly agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Naseby. Although we may disagree about sunset clauses, he absolutely hit the nail on the head about the need for consolidation. We link these together because we think there needs to be a time limit.
The Minister said absolutely nothing about what he thinks may happen next. It is simply not acceptable, and the House of Lords scrutiny committees—the Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers Committee—said that it is not acceptable, democratic, accountable or even safe to continue to run this area of public policy simply by regulation. Since the Minister and the Government have not brought forward anything that actually tackles that problem, that is what this suite of amendments seeks to do. All the discussion we have had in the past hour tells me that we are right to do this.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, who mentioned the Law Commission during our discussions about this, that that is a bit of a phantom. We all know that the Law Commission works on a three- to four-year cycle. It is a law unto itself: the Government cannot instruct the Law Commission to do anything, quite rightly. That may or may not be the right way forward, but it could take 10 or 15 years: it certainly does not hurry itself. So, in theory it is quite a nice idea, but I suspect that it would probably not work within the time limits we have before us.
I listened carefully to the Minister. It was a classic explanation of why something cannot be done and, on that basis, since the Minister seems to think that nothing can be done, I beg to test the opinion of the House.