Clause 43
Crossrail Bill
11:45 am
Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster, Conservative)
There is great danger that we get bad drafting if we allow too much legislation simply to consider precedent. I say that as someone who practised briefly as a solicitor in the early 1990s. Whenever a novel problem arose there was a temptation to ask, “Where’s the precedent?” We are joking about this to a certain extent, and I accept that there are similarities between the two pieces of legislation that make it logical at least to keep an eye on how the clauses are drafted.
There is an issue to consider about parliamentary drafting if the draftsman’s first instinct is, “Let’s look at the precedent and see how we can mess around with it,” when thelegislation is 11 years old. That is not a terribly sensible approach. Our approach should be to ask what we are trying to achieve to ensure that this is robust legislation for decades to come. We should not simply justify it by looking at precedent. It might be easy to draft and slightly easier for the Minister to justify certain clauses, but we need to look much more sensibly at what the Bill is trying to achieve.