UK Parliament / Open data

Welfare Reform Bill

Back to me, I am afraid. My noble friend and I tabled this amendment as a response to your Lordships’ Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform. New Section 2A of the 1953 Act, inserted by paragraph 4 of Schedule 6, requires the mother of a child who was not married to the child’s father at the time of its birth to provide the registrar with information required by new Section 2B(1). That provision in turn confers power on the Registrar General to prescribe the relevant information in regulations, which may include information not included to be entered on the register. The committee considered that that power was a substantive one rather than purely procedural, and that it was closer in character to those conferred by subsections (4) and (6) of new Section 2B, which is to be exercised by negative regulations, than to those conferred by subsections (2) and (3) to be made under the Bill by the Registrar General and subject to no parliamentary procedure. Accordingly, the committee made its recommendation that the Bill should be amended to include Section 2B(1) in new Section 39A(5) inserted by paragraph 17 of the Schedule, so that regulations under new Section 2B(1) are made by the Minister and are subject to the negative procedure. I will not revert to the argument about "Minister" and "Secretary of State" at this point, but doubtless we will come back to it in the near future. I hope that should any members of the DPRC have read this amendment, they would consider it to be an adequate response to their recommendation. I recommend it to the Minister and the Grand Committee and I beg to move.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
712 c196GC 
Session
2008-09
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
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