Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 65 and to speak to the associated amendments. My noble friend Lord Warner just said that he was beginning to feel sorry for the noble Lord, Lord McNally. It may be that my compassion is more easily triggered than his, but my feeling sorry for Ministers started very early on in this Bill—particularly for the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, who has had to sit through the bulk of it. These amendments are designed to improve the procedure for this Bill, both during the remaining stages of the primary legislation and in how we deal with secondary legislation in what remains of the Bill when it is eventually passed. The first five amendments in this group are essentially paving amendments for Amendments 113 and 119, which are the substantive ones and appear quite late in the Bill. It would have been better had we found a hook to hang them on earlier in the Bill, but Clause 8 deals with the procedure for developing the secondary legislation. In other words, these amendments are designed to help, whether the Front Bench opposite believes that or not. It was unfortunate that from the beginning the Government refused the suggestion of a Select Committee, but the amendments provide an alternative to that in relatively straightforward terms. As I do not really need to remind the Government or the Committee, we have already seen great chunks of the Bill having to be dropped, partly on substantive grounds and partly on procedural grounds. We have lost forestry and much about the Ministry of Justice quangos which were to be merged or abolished under the Bill. I understand that we are about to lose the whole of Schedule 7 and I think we applaud the Government’s flexibility on that, but they ought never to have got to this stage and the Bill should not have been constructed as it was. We need a clear and more formal explanation from the Government of why these great lists of quangos are deemed suitable for abolition or merger. I appreciate that before each Committee session we get a list of the quangos that are likely to come up for decision during it, but they do not really suffice. Today, for example, for our enormously important debate on the Youth Justice Board, which excited great interest here in Committee and beyond, we had five lines explaining the reasons for abolishing that board. My next amendment deals with an organisation for which there are two lines of explanation. Again, I appreciate that the Minister and his colleagues have sent us several other letters to try to explain this more clearly. However, it would be much more sensible if a clear explanation were put before Parliament, rather than one in the form of regulations and incomprehensible cross-references between clauses and existing legislation, of why the Government deem, for example, that the Youth Justice Board or Ofgem, or any of the regulators, should be abolished and the context in which those decisions are being made. There will shortly be a debate about the Equality and Human Rights Commission, for which we have two whole pages of explanation. It is central to a lot of our law and our approach to society, yet we do not have a realistic explanation of why the change is proposed. As a result, the Government have had to concede a lot of the Bill at the first hurdle. The Government have also conceded that in some other areas they will in any case need primary legislation. Late the other night, and during the previous Session of Parliament, it was conceded that the self-regulating replacement for the Security Industry Authority would need new primary legislation with statutory backing. If that is the case, the point of having this in secondary legislation falls and the point of these lists—and the whole structure of the Bill—begins to fall. The amendments that I propose here would allow us to proceed with the Bill as it is, unsatisfactory though I think most of the Committee by now deems it. It would at least mean that we were assured that when we came to the secondary legislation stage, both Houses would have before them a very clear explanation to debate and vote on before proceeding with the abolition or the merger of any such bodies. This would cover everything that is in Schedules 1 to 6—Schedule 7 we will shortly drop—and it would mean that Parliament could have a sensible debate. If we were convinced by the explanation given in prose by the Government, they could proceed in the normal way to secondary legislation. If we were not convinced, they would have to withdraw the intent on secondary legislation, and if they still wanted to do it they would have to revert to primary legislation in the way that they now propose to do, and not only for the organisations that I have suggested. In the area of competition authorities, for example, it has been made clear by the sponsoring department that the Government cannot simply change them thorough secondary legislation provided for under this Bill, but will have to have separate primary legislation to change the whole competition regime—and quite rightly, too. Even at this late stage, if we adopted the provisions in these two main clauses we could ensure that there was an adequate debate and that we made the decisions on a firm basis. Amendment 113 simply suggests that before Ministers come forward to trigger the secondary legislation under the Bill, they place such a document before both Houses before we proceed. Prior to any discussion of the Youth Justice Board, and before the secondary legislation emerged, we would therefore have had a very clear explanation of why the Government thought that change should be made. The outrage that people felt about the YJB, forestry and other issues would have been ameliorated had it been clear that there would be another chance to have that substantive debate. Amendment 119 recognises that you cannot just deal with these proposals, individual organisation by individual organisation. There is the whole question of what the government strategy is for various areas of our non-departmental public bodies. I declare a past interest in relation to consumer bodies: until six weeks ago I was the chair of Consumer Focus, one of the bodies in Schedule 1. The future of Consumer Focus, which is effectively to be transferred to the third sector, is inseparable from the overall approach to consumer representation in government policy on a number of fronts. There are other bodies. We will be debating Passenger Focus later with regard to rail and bus transport. There is a consumer body for water, and those that are represented by Consumer Focus under the Energy Act and the Postal Services Act, including the one that we are due to debate next week. There is a whole range of different structures in statutorily provided consumer bodies, sometimes taxpayer-funded, though not always, and sometimes mandatorily industry-funded. This Government’s original intention, which I applauded, was to look at that landscape as a whole; it was the intent of BIS, the main sponsoring department, to look at it in that light. In fact, it has lost a lot of Whitehall battles, and I am sad that that is the case. We are now debating each of those bodies separately and we will come up with different solutions, aggravating what is already a hotchpotch of consumer representation in that landscape. On an even bigger scale, the same applies to economic regulators. There are economic regulators that appear in several of these schedules—Ofcom appears several times—while some appear only in Schedule 7 and therefore, I guess, they can relax. Others appear once or more in Schedules 1 to 6; Ofgem, Ofcom and the Office of Rail Regulation are all in here. Again, when the Government first came to office, they promised us a review of economic regulation and of what is appropriate for an independent regulator, what is appropriate for a government department, what is appropriate for lighter-touch regulation and so forth. It was an agenda that I did not entirely agree with but at least it would have been coherent. If we proceed under what is laid down in the Bill, however, we will take one view of what is appropriate for the regulation of energy regarding the balance between Ministers and the regulator and a different one for telecoms. Maybe that is justified, but it is not a priori obvious that it is justifiable. A clear and adequate explanation is therefore needed for this House, and I suggest in Amendment 119 that on bodies like economic regulators you should have that overall discussion in Parliament before you move to specific secondary legislation dealing with particular bodies. There could be other groups of bodies that arise in the Bill; indeed, we are about to come on to a load of environmental bodies. The very first amendment that I moved in this Committee session related to scientific advisory bodies. It is not clear why some scientific advisory bodies are to be dropped and others are not. There must be a general explanation of the science policy across government that makes those decisions clear but it has not been put before the House; we have dealt with them on an individual basis. Most of us would hope that Ministers received some independent scientific advice before they took important scientific decisions; hitherto, by and large, independent advisory committees with experts on the scientific areas concerned provided them with such advice. So there are groups of bodies that need addressing. My main point here is that the Government, having proceeded on this list basis, now need to rescue it a bit and bring us back to what would be a normal parliamentary procedure, with something like a White Paper or a Green Paper, before they actually proceed area by area and organisation by organisation. I appreciate that the Government do not want to do all that in primary legislation. I have been a Minister too, and I understand that sometimes the complications of having to wait for primary legislation to change what appears to be a relatively small part of the machinery of government is very frustrating. However, it has to be done with the approval of Parliament in some sense. If you are taking the process away from primary legislation, at least this House—and to some extent, I suspect, colleagues down the road—would like to see clearly the way in which you are doing it and a clear basis for it. I think that Ministers realise now that a series of schedules and lists is not the way to do it and is not adequate. My amendment would help them in future to assure people that we would have that debate further down the line and assure them that, when secondary legislation came to be proposed, it would be done on a straightforward and understandable basis. As we all know, the tradition is that we do not vote against or amend secondary legislation. That convention would be stretched if we had not previously had the kind of debate that I am envisaging in these amendments. I am asking the Government at least to recognise that at some stage we need to have that debate and that parliamentary decision on the basis of a formal document from the Government. This would make the Government’s life easier; at least, I hope so. It would certainly help us to get the Bill through the primary stage rather faster, and I wish that the Government had come forward with such a measure earlier. For the moment, I beg to move.