Business of the House

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Gentleman has raised a horrifying problem. He often refers to the abuse of people across the world for their racial or religious beliefs, and he is absolutely right to do so. I pay tribute to Amnesty for its work in highlighting such problems, and I encourage the hon. Gentleman to seek an Adjournment debate so that he can raise this awful situation directly with Ministers.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

The Leader of the House will know that I have been pressing her on missing legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) has already mentioned the missing Agriculture Bill, and the Fisheries Bill is also missing, but what about those statutory instruments? The right hon. Lady says that she is confident of getting through 200 of them before Brexit day, but even with my simple mathematical skills, I can work out that that would involve getting through about seven per sitting day. The SIs are overwhelmingly concentrated in four Departments, and as Opposition Whip for one of those Departments, I can tell her that I have several box files of SIs that have yet to be scheduled. Why is she so confident that we are going to manage to do this, with proper scrutiny, in time for 29 March?

[Andrea Leadsom]

I say again that we have up to 600 Brexit SIs. In this Session we have introduced a whole new system of monitoring, specifically to ensure that we are in control of the order and flow of SIs, that we get the job done in time, that the quality of impact assessments and explanatory memorandums is absolutely right, and that the SIs get the required scrutiny of this House. I can only reiterate that we are confident that we will be able to get the necessary legislation through by 29 March.