My Lords, currently the Bill provides that regulations under Clause 3 shall be made under the negative resolution procedure and then interact with rules of court to be made and come into force without the need for parliamentary scrutiny altogether. This stipulation of which judicial functions may be delegated and to whom, and an authorised person’s requisite qualifications or experience, is to be provided
with quite light parliamentary scrutiny. I would be grateful to the noble and learned Lord or the noble Baroness if they would say a little more in their reply about the relationship between the regulations and the rules for those purposes.
Since the fall of the Prisons and Courts Bill last year, there has been no parliamentary scrutiny, even by the Justice Committee, of the Government’s ambitious programme of expensive modernisation measures or the associated court closures and staff cuts. By providing that regulations in the Bill be made under the negative resolution procedure, the Government seem once more to be seeking to avoid proper parliamentary scrutiny, even in relation to quite significant changes to our justice system.
At Second Reading, in response to similar concerns, the Minister said that,
“the purpose of primary legislation is to implement law, not to review that which we can already do”.—[Official Report, 20/6/18; col. 2053.]
On reflection, I respectfully disagree with that constitutional analysis. To my mind, the legislative process is to create law and certainly, at times, to review, direct and even constrain government policy, particularly when it has the potential profoundly to impact on our justice system. Without careful scrutiny and additional safeguards, this governmental drip feed may be capable of eroding some of our most fundamental institutions. I beg to move.