Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Amendment 96 is in my name and I feel that, if the mood of the House were different, I could have pushed it pretty hard. I shall briefly explain why I think that it is a matter of importance to the Bill and to our general approach to orders. At the moment, with almost no exceptions, orders are unamendable in this House. If we are unhappy about them, we can only vote them down, in which case we are breaching the convention that we should not undermine something that has come from the Commons where the Commons cannot have a second say. As your Lordships know, if we vote an order down, that is the end of it and the House of Commons has to start the process again. That is an unsatisfactory position on orders and something to which—unless the Minister accedes to the amendment today—I am sure the House will return when we consider Lords reform. The way that this is operating is not right. When I was a Northern Ireland Minister, most legislation was done by order. Sometimes, the House would be faced with an order 40, 50 or 60 pages long—longer than many Bills—and yet it was totally unamendable. People in Northern Ireland were pretty fed up, saying, ““There is a major change in our housing policy and it is going through without an opportunity for it to be debated properly here””. Now, of course, they can do it as they wish in Stormont. We know that many orders are to give effect to EU legislation. If I understand the Government’s EU Bill correctly, there will be fewer of those in future, as they will be replaced by primary legislation. The EU Bill has not gone through and perhaps that part of it will not—I hope that it will not. If orders to give effect to EU legislation were amendable, we would save the Government a lot of effort with the need to have primary legislation and, at the same time, achieve the objective of giving this House a proper say. I think that these arguments are pretty sound. I remember that, when I was in the Commons, we found a Bill under which there was an order-making power and, for reasons that totally escape me today, it was possible to amend that. We wondered at the time why Parliament could not amend orders. This seems a very reasonable proposition. I do not think that it would open the floodgates and it would make sense—nowhere more so than in this Bill. A lot of the argument about this Bill is due to the fact that, when the day comes and the Government table the order to give effect to changes to many quangos, we will have no chance to amend it. There may be consultation beforehand or other methods, to which my noble friend Lord Hunt referred, but, on the whole, we will not be able to make an amendment. This is such a simple proposition that I do not understand why it has not been adopted long ago and why it cannot be adopted in the Bill.