Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire, Conservative)

I join the Minister in expressing appreciation that you, Mr. Cook, are chairing the Committee. I recall—I may be misremembering—that you chaired a committee that considered trade and industry issues on which I served earlier in this Parliament, and that you have an understanding of and sympathy for business issues. That will help you to appreciate the context in which we set our discussion, although the debate is not intended to be a detailed discussion of the purposes of specific orders that may be introduced.

I share the Minister's belief that our discussions should be constructive. It should not simply be an opportunity for the Government to listen to debates on amendments and then simply reject them out of hand. The Government should not believe that a Bill is perfect when it arrives in Committee simply because it has received substantial pre-legislative scrutiny—although we may have understood them to have assumed that that was the case on Second Reading. It was found that pre-legislative scrutiny had not delivered a perfect Bill to the other place, where amendments were tabled. I understand that it is not the Government's intention to table amendments in Committee. Some of my colleagues in other Committees have been rightly critical of the Government tabling a great number of amendments because of the lack of preparedness of the legislation. Although the Minister is right to say that it is not the Government's intention to amend the Bill, I hope that it is not their intention to stand against amendments that are needed or those which should be reported to the House.

The Programming Sub-Committee's resolution has a tight time scale, but if we are constructive and purposeful, I hope that we can deliver a satisfactory report on the amendments so far tabled, and those yet to come. The Minister will have observed that we have not tabled any amendments in respect of the codes of practice on enforcement, but I hope that we will discuss that on Thursday.

As in the House of Lords, we have just short of 10 hours of Committee time for the debate. Judging by the House of Lords debate, we will be hard pressed satisfactorily to deal with the entire Bill and amendments. However, we are happy to concur with the programme resolution and hope to have constructive debates.

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