Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

There is, of course, a slight gap between the way in which we talk about Parliament and how it operates, and perhaps we ought to confess to that, in the interests of people who listen to our debates and read the reports of them. That was caught quite nicely by the casual remark of my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller), the Chairman of the Regulatory Reform Committee, when he said as an aside that the Conservative members of that Committee do not turn up. I do not say that to make a trivial party point of the kind that we are prone to make; I say it only because we are talking about the great powers that should live within our Select Committees and how important it is that their will should prevail, and we then go on to talk about the glories of Parliament itself. Yet that is suddenly pierced when we see the reality of how such things work. It is rather amusing in a way to watch the Opposition parties failing to agree on what would be appropriate for Parliament to do in the circumstances—whether it is better that a Committee should decide, whether the whole House should decide, or whether a percentage of the House should decide, all of which ideas depend on different versions of what Parliament is and how it operates. However, it is quite a perverse argument to suggest that the House itself should not decide on a matter before it. That argument is being put, because the House is governed by parties and inbuilt majorities. That is true; it is how our system works—but it is odd to pick away at that system in one little segment without acknowledging the fact in our wider deliberations. That is a curious proposition, because anyone looking at it from the outside would think it a rather sensible procedure for the whole House—the Commons bit of parliamentary sovereignty—to exercise its power, so that it can constitutionally trump whatever a part of the House might decide. That would seem the constitutionally proper arrangement. Indeed, that is precisely how we proceed in the entirety of our business. To acknowledge publicly that we do not want to proceed in that way, as is being argued, is to give the game away, in a sense, about how this place operates. If we are going to do that, we should at least follow the argument through and give the whole game away, and not pretend that we can just give a little bit of it away. I take this area of the Bill and the amendments seriously. They are crucial. As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) just said, we are talking about one of the most objectionable bits of the first incarnation of the Bill. It was right to say that it would become less objectionable, or unobjectionable, only if an effective veto were put into the Bill to provide a mechanism to enable us to say, ““It is not appropriate to use this mechanism for this purpose,”” and for that view to prevail. The question is: have the Government have inserted such a mechanism? The answer is: partly. We have, perhaps, a qualified veto. We have a recommendation power. However, if it is a veto, it could be argued that we have a provision to veto the veto. Then we are back to the arguments that I have just described about how Parliament works. Parliament can collectively decide what to do—but we know that in reality, that can subvert the mechanism that we think we have established to do a job for us. As has been said, we are talking about a Committee that has a Government majority anyway, so why do the Government need the reassurance of a veto on the veto when they have inserted a procedure that, on the whole, is thought to be satisfactory? There may be disagreements about the mechanisms being recommended, but what unites everybody who is contributing to this discussion is the proposition that we want a strong rather than a weak veto. We want an effective veto, rather than an ineffective one. We are entitled to look to the Government to provide assurances about what is going to happen in the days to come to deliver that effective veto, so that this whole area of concern about the Bill is comprehensively removed. That is my main point. I have one further point on a matter that has been raised already—trying to specify the grounds on which the qualified veto can be exercised by a Committee. Government amendments Nos. 46, 50, 54 and 55 insert that qualified veto, but they also set out the only grounds that a Committee may properly take into account when deciding whether to exercise that veto. Including in the Bill in that way the grounds on which a Committee may make a decision is entirely new. Previously, that has always been a matter for Standing Orders. There are two difficult alternatives: either the courts will have the power to review proceedings in Parliament, or the limitation is entirely ineffective because the courts would hold that power without an express provision overriding article 9 of the Bill of Rights. They have no power to examine a Committee’s reasoning, because to do so would be to ““impeach or question”” proceedings in Parliament. It is constitutionally extremely peculiar to invite the courts to review judicially the validity of parliamentary decisions. That is why a number of the amendments—including one tabled by me—seek to remove those parts of the veto provision. I hope that when he replies, the Minister will assure us that the concerns being expressed about the effectiveness of the veto will be addressed, and that he will reflect further and deliver a veto that will be strong rather than weak, and effective rather than ineffective. I hope that he will reconsider whether it is necessary, or indeed constitutionally desirable or possible, to specify the grounds on which a Committee of the House can exercise its power.