My Lords, I have not participated in Committee before. The Committee will be aware from my speech at Second Reading that I have my concerns about the Bill, but, having sat through substantially all today’s proceedings, I have some sympathy with my noble friends on the Front Bench. They face two irreconcilable requests. We began this afternoon with an urgent need to clarify as soon as possible. I am not picking out the noble Lord, Lord Collins, particularly, but he talked about aviation, holidays and so on, and, of course, if you want to get clarity quickly, you need to resolve quickly, so you have a short deadline.
Then, later, we are now saying, through my noble friend Lady McIntosh, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Fox, I think, that actually we want to spin it out, we want to push it out for time for consultation—maybe 26, maybe 28. But we all know Parkinson’s Law, which says that the job expands to fill the time available for its completion. Therefore, those who wish to push it out will have to accept that most of it will come towards the end of that period, life being what it is, and the period of uncertainty, therefore, will be extended. That is the dichotomy that the Committee is not clear about, and I am not surprised that my noble friends on the Front Bench find it quite hard to reconcile those two points of view: I have some sympathy with the position they find themselves in at present.