Yes, I do; my colleagues and I have argued that. Being mindful of your strictures on addressing the proposals under discussion, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I will be succinct in my comments on this matter. The two principal deficits are that the European Parliament does not have enough power and that the European Council meets behind closed doors where it can carve things up, out of the public domain. So, yes, there is inadequate scrutiny there, but we are talking today about scrutiny here.

There is an unresolved overlap or tension between the responsibilities of subject Select Committees and the European Select Committee. The most common overlap is with the Foreign Affairs Committee; it did its own work on the Lisbon treaty, for example. There is still work to be done on where the dividing lines should be drawn. The Liaison Committee has an interest in this matter as, of course, do the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk and the departmental Select Committees. Work must be done so that we make the best use of the expertise in this House and ensure that subject-specific areas of European legislative proposal are looked at by those who take the greatest interest in them. We might need to make further changes.

It might be the case that each of the subject Select Committees has a sub-committee dealing with European affairs and has relevant expertise so an interrelationship might be of benefit. I realise that there are proposals on the Order Paper seeking to deal with that, by allowing people from the relevant Select Committee to be on the relevant European Committee when it deals with certain matters. That is an improvement, and I welcome it.

The current commentary is to the effect that the scrutiny process in the other place has become very effective and we might still have quite a way to go to catch up. The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk and his colleagues have done very well, but there is certainly now strong scrutiny in the other place. The Modernisation Committee proposed a Joint Committee; the largest number of recommendations to it were for a Joint Committee on Europe, which would be a very strong beast.

The Minister has not responded to that proposal, and I think I am right in saying that, unusually, we have not had a Government response to this Modernisation Committee report on these issues. Usually, we get a Committee report and the Government publish their response; in this instance, the response has come in the form of this debate and the proposals made. I urge the Deputy Leader of the House to think seriously, in conjunction with colleagues and being mindful of all the sensitivities, about whether there is not merit in having a Joint Committee of both Houses on these matters, not least to do the sort of things that the Modernisation Committee suggested, for example, questioning Commissioners. We have lost that good idea in the process of moving where we have.

The Leader of the House and her deputy have consulted on these proposals, and they are generally welcome, because they are all steps in the right direction. I thank them for their courtesy in consulting. They picked up the desire for moving in a more effective direction, and that is reflected in the motion. That is good.

I am glad that the Government have accepted amendment (a), which proposes that we try this system for a period and then re-examine it. The Deputy Leader of the House says that she sees this as being the next phase and by no means more than that, and that we might need to move on relatively quickly in the light of ideas and suggestions. That is also good.

I heard the Deputy Leader of the House say that she has accepted the important principle of amendment (b), which is that the people who go on to the relevant Committee from the European Scrutiny Committee should be the people whom the European Scrutiny Committee judges are the most appropriate to do that job. Let us be absolutely honest about this. One of this bit of the system's traditional failings has been that many nominations were made because the Committee of Selection was under pressure to fit everybody in, and thus people who were not volunteering, who were not keen and who were not knowledgeable were chosen. People were selected because it was their turn to do this duty or because they had been naughty boys or girls and they had been selected as punishment. That approach is nonsense.

Given the issue's seriousness, we must be serious about who does the job, hence the principle that the European Scrutiny Committee should be permanent for a Parliament to enable it to build up expertise. The three new European Committees— there is a question as to whether we need only three—should contain a core of expertise that remains.

Let us consider the example of the Committee that will deal with justice and home affairs. Such issues—terrorism, immigration and so on—are important. Even if the UK has the opt-outs under the Lisbon treaty, or even with a loss of business, that Committee will need people who know what they are talking about, who have been there before and who do not just turn up for a week or two and then leave. I think that the Deputy Leader of the House understands that.

These Committees need to contain a core of people who see such scrutiny as a main and important function. That is the feedback that I have been given, and it is the impression that I have picked up when I have been involved. We might need to have a cross-party discussion, led by the European Scrutiny Committee, about the number of Committees we require. It may be better to have four or five Committees with fewer members, where people are able to take things seriously, covering the main subject areas of European Union legislative activity.

I come to a general reform of government point, which the Deputy Leader of the House has heard me make before. We have a Government who have grown to be far too big for the legislature—there are now more than 100 Ministers, in addition to the Parliamentary Private Secretaries. If none of them can be free spirits, the number of people available to do all the Committee work is reduced. Until and unless we rein in the number of Ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries relative to the number of Members of Parliament, we will always struggle to get the people with the expertise to do the scrutiny job. As everybody has said, it is very difficult for the legislative to rein in the growth of the Executive. It is always difficult for Governments to deliver on that because they get tempted to do otherwise.

I have two final points to make. On amendment (c), it must be right that a motion that comes from a Committee to Parliament is the motion that the Committee agreed. We must start with the starting point. There is no point in having a Committee that is then counteracted. I shall listen carefully to what the Deputy Leader of the House says in her winding-up speech, but if I have understood her correctly, she accepts that this case should be the same as that for Opposition days, when the motion is chosen by the relevant party and then amended by the Government. For the benefit of outsiders, that would mean that the subject would come from the Committee, not the Government. That is important and would be the right way round.

An indirectly related point is the scrutiny reserve. That is another technical but hugely important point—we all know what it means, but if we were to do an opinion poll in any of our constituencies, we would get more than the usual number of blank looks from people.