Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

I want to speak about part 1 and confine my remarks to the constitutional aspects of the Bill. This seems to me to be extraordinary legislation. It proposes changes to the legislative process that in any other country in Europe, and perhaps in the world, would require a constitutional amendment. That is one of the reasons that part 1 has to be taken on the Floor of the House. Obviously, I welcome, as we all do, the Minister’s assurances that his test of whether something is controversial or highly controversial, and the mechanism of the Committee veto, will offer extra safeguards, but the problems are clear with those two safeguards. There is at the moment no definition of ““controversy”” in the Bill and the Committee majority mechanism does not deal with the controversy point. It is possible for a matter to be highly controversial with only a minority of members. A Committee could easily decide in favour of taking the order through the procedure introduced by the Bill, even though the matter was highly controversial in other parts of the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) mentioned the fact that matters could be controversial for Back Benchers but not necessarily for the Front Benchers of the main parties. Therefore, as the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Alison Seabeck) said, there needs to be some extra safeguards, including subject matter safeguards. May I suggest one other possible mechanism: the mechanism of call-in, whereby a certain number of Members—any Members, perhaps 50 or 70—could call in a decision so that it could not go through the procedure laid down in the Bill, but had to go through full legislative scrutiny?I make that suggestion for another reason. One aspect of the Bill that seems quite disturbing is that it allows not just the addition of new crimes, with up to two years imprisonment or a level 5 fine, but it allows the Government to use the procedure to undertake structural change. Often, legislation does not regulate or add crimes, but sets up bodies and gives them powers. Among those bodies are, of course, local authorities. It strikes me that under the Bill as presently drafted, structural and functional reform of local government could be achieved without proper legislative scrutiny. Therefore, simply through using that mechanism, the balance of the constitution itself between local and central Government could be changed. The Government will say, ““Would that not be controversial?”” That comes back to the point about the weakness of that test. Even the structure of the courts could be changed because they are no longer a matter of common law; they are a matter of statute. Any creature of statute, which technically includes any company, could be changed by these provisions.