9:00 am
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, Conservative)
On a point of order, Mr. Chope. On Tuesday, the Government tabled 89 amendments. There were 94 Government amendments on the amendment paper before that. I am concerned that just 22 days after Second Reading, the Bill is very different from the one that was agreed by our colleagues. Those amendments have not come from the Opposition, but from the Government. This is not a good way of putting legislation through the House.
The timetable for consideration of the Bill was agreed on the basis of there being 256 clauses and certain assumptions were made about the number of amendments that would be tabled for debate by the Opposition. We even took into account the erudition of my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings in calculating the number of sittings that would be needed to scrutinise the Bill properly. We now discover that we have almost 200 Government amendments to scrutinise and debate between now and 31 March. That is not a satisfactory way to conduct business. Will you advise us, Mr. Chope, on what procedures we can adopt to ensure that the Bill and the Government amendments receive the scrutiny that they require?