Amendment of the Law

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for his explanation and I agree with the welcome, to which he drew attention, for the consultation on and publication online of the proposed measures before the summer break.

There is still no good reason for this year’s post-election finance legislation being split into two Bills other than the Government’s wanting to get key measures on to the statute book before all the Government Members realised fully what was going on—before, for example, they had the change to read the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Budget assessment, published last month, which stated that the Budget was “clearly regressive”, or the analysis published by the TUC just a few days ago, which underlined the same point.

We are committed in the debates that will follow to holding the Government to account on fairness and to scrutinising closely the quality of the legislation that the Government propose, which I hope will reflect the benefit of the consultation to which the Minister referred. The Opposition will be busy once the Bill is in front of us, both on the Floor of the House and in Committee, but we have no reason to oppose the resolutions and we are happy for them to proceed.