Thank you for your email and for altering me to ways in which this Bill
could be improved.
I have written to the Secretary of State, Margaret Beckett, on your
behalf to raise these issues and will write to you again as soon as I
receive a reply.
The Bill is in the middle of its passage through the House. It has
received a Second Reading (a one day debate on the general approach and
intentions of the Bill) and has just completed its Commons Standing
Committee stage during which the Bill is considered in detail, clause
by
clause and line by line. Next Tuesday, 14th March, the Committee will
report back to the House and any amendments that were made in Committee
will be confirmed, or deleted. At the same time this Report Stage
allows the opportunity to table and debate New Clauses that might be
added to the Bill.
If the Bill passes through Report it is ssent to the House of Lords
where all the above stages (Second Reading, Committee and Report) are
repeated after which it returns to the Commons (sometime in the summer
session) for us to accept or reject any changes that the Lords may have
made. Only then does it go to receive the Royal Assent, and become
law,
probably by the end of the year.
So you can see that there remain several stages at which amendments
that
achieve the sort of changes that you seek can be made.
I am not the right MP to table or speak to those amendments as I know
nothing about these issues but you can be certain that there will be
MPs, of all parties, who will be pursuing them.
I will write to you when I've heard from Margaret Beckett.
Best wishes
Mark Fisher
/www.PetitionOnline.com/fishtank
