It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Gale, and to entertain the Economic Secretary, who obviously did not notice me on the previous occasions that I attended, because I have not spoken all that much.

The clause is rather weird. Without going into all the details of the constitutional legislation that it may infringe, such as the European Communities Act 1972 and the Human Rights Act 1998, as well as the traditional issues of judicial review and the grounds on which challenges can be brought, there is one particular weirdness in it that I want to highlight. Suppose that someone has sued the Government, because they made a mistake, and won the case. The idea of passing legislation that reverses the judgment and provides that that person has to pay back the money and all the costs on both sides, with interest, which is basically what subsection (4) says, is quite odd. It is a strange idea that when someone has won a legal case, the whole thing can then be reversed through statute.

There is a substantial argument for drawing a line after six years and moving on, in terms of dealing with tax—there has to be some sort of symmetry—but the idea of reversing judgments through statutes, without any consideration of costs, has to be a strange one. Someone has won a case and got their costs, and now we are saying, “You’ve lost the case and you’ve got to pay the money back, with interest,” although the rate is not specified. We are saying, “Obviously, if you’ve lost the case, you have to pay the costs.” That is absurd. Of course, we are not going to divide on this, but the Government should respond regarding the idea of reversing judgments.