I am grateful to all noble Lords in the Committee, in particular the Minister. He will forgive me if I was overly animated; I hope he does not think that we have fallen out as I find it hard to envisage circumstances in which we would do so.
I am grateful for the Minister’s clarification of the Government’s intention in Clause 3(3): that the consultation will be broader than just the Attorney-General and will include the whole Cabinet or any relevant Secretary of State. I may be a fool but I always thought that, in our constitution, the Cabinet, the Government and the Secretary of State were virtually indivisible and there was no need to create statutory duties on individual Secretaries of State to consult each other. I may be wrong about that but the Minister’s argument is that he needs provision in the Bill for the Secretary of State to consult the Attorney-General, yet no similar provision is required for the Secretary of State to consult the statutory creature—the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, does not look like a statutory creature; she is a wonderful human creature—that is the Victim’s Commissioner. I am confused about that but perhaps, in due course, the Minister and his colleagues will deliberate it; I like the noises that I am hearing about possible reflection.
Without provisions of this kind and of the kind that we will debate in the next group, this whole part of the Bill will be Conan Doyle. In particular, for fans of Conan Doyle, this is The Adventure of Silver Blaze. This is the curious incident of the victims’ code that made friends and did not always bark in the night. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment and not bark in the night.