Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I hope that I will be able to give the noble Lord the assurances that he is looking for. First, I shall speak to Amendment 22, which is intended to add two further grounds for removing a member of the commission to paragraph 6 of Schedule 1—removal due to misconduct or a failure to comply with the terms of appointment. I agree with noble Lords that a future Secretary of State must have sufficient powers to remove a member of the commission if it transpires that they are not fit to serve in that office. I am therefore happy to confirm that the existing provisions within paragraph 6 of Schedule 1 will allow the Secretary of State to remove a member on these grounds. In particular, the provision in paragraph 6(d) empowers the Secretary of State to remove a member should he be satisfied that the member is "otherwise unable or unfit" to perform his duties. This gives the Secretary of State the power to remove a member on the grounds both of misconduct and failure to comply with the terms of his appointment. The noble Lord raised the example of Professor Nutt. In that case, the Secretary of State was confident that he was empowered to remove that person on the basis of his not complying with the terms of his appointment. The provisions of paragraph 6 of Schedule 1 follow precedents set in other legislation setting up advisory public bodies, such as the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, which established the Low Pay Commission, and the Social Security Act 1980, which established the Social Security Advisory Committee. As we know, we are talking about an advisory NDPB. With those assurances, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment. Amendment 23 is similar to Amendment 22, in that it seeks to ensure that a commission member can be removed if he is unwilling to perform the duties of that office. I reassure the Committee that such a person can be removed using the existing provisions of the Bill. First, an unwilling member could conceivably be absent from a series of commission meetings. In the ordinary course of events, one would expect a member of the commission who was unwilling to perform his duties to resign his office. Paragraph 5 of Schedule 1 provides for him to do so in writing to the Secretary of State. There may, I suppose, exceptionally be an instance of a person becoming unwilling to serve and at the same time reluctant to offer to leave the body. In such a case, the grounds set out in paragraph 6(d), covering inability or unfitness to perform the duties of the office, are sufficient for the Secretary of State to remove him from membership of the commission. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, asked about the provisions in these amendments compared with other Bills. The provisions in Schedule 2 are based on previous legislation establishing NDPBs—for example, the Climate Change Act establishing the Committee on Climate Change. If the noble Lord would like to write to me detailing the pieces of legislation that are not included, as he sees it—