Member

On Amendment 20N, I can be brief on this point, because we discussed it during the debate on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act that we had at Second Reading and on the previous day in Committee. The simple reality is that the statutory process under CRaG 2010 and the procedural conventions of the two Houses of Parliament should afford the other place less power to scrutinise treaties than it does your Lordships’ House. That was never meant to be the case; it is a perverse outcome from an attempt to enshrine the Ponsonby rule, as it was, in statute—and of course that has not worked. The Government were supposed to have allowed a substantive debate in the other place on the treaty, and it is appalling that they did not. It shows that, for all their high-minded talk of values before the general election, this Government are unwilling to adhere to long-established conventions on treaty scrutiny. I shall not dwell on this any further, other than to remind the Minister that the Ponsonby rule was established under a Labour Government and it is ironic that it is now a Labour Government who have effectively killed it.