My Lords, I shall speak briefly to government Amendments 1, 3 to 7, 9 to 12 and 14 to 31, as well as to my related Amendment 2. First, I thank the Minister and her team for their close engagement with us on the Bill and their time, patience and occasional willingness to change their minds.
The government amendments are a good example of mind-changing. As the Minister said, they remove the instances in Part 1 of first-use-only affirmative procedures; that is a very good thing. The DPRRC’s report on the Bill in February this year was concerned about the use of these procedures. It pointed out that the powers in the regulations remain exactly the same on subsequent use. In Committee, I strongly urged the Government to remove this type of procedure; I very much welcome the fact that they have now done this. All the subsequent uses of the negative procedure have been withdrawn by these amendments.
However, one negative procedure remains: what is left of Clause 11(8) in line 18 on page 7. This is the subject of my probing Amendment 2. Subsection (8), as amended by government Amendment 3, prescribes the negative resolution procedure for regulations under Clause 11(2)(e). Subsection (2)(e) seems a little opaque. It seems to allow the Secretary of State to add persons or categories to those whose fitness and propriety TPR must assess. On 22 June, the Government confirmed to me in writing that this was the case. They believed that this was largely an operational matter and that the negative procedure provided
“appropriate scrutiny as well as opportunity for debate if desired”.
This is a mischaracterisation of the negative procedure, which in practice barely merits the label “scrutiny” at all. Possibly because I did not ask them to, the Government did not address why subsection (2)(e) was necessary at all or give examples of what kind of persons or categories of persons are envisaged in subsection (2)(e) and what role they may play in the schemes themselves. Any additional involvement of these persons or categories of persons may give them significant influence over the conduct of the schemes.
It is obviously desirable to have these new entrants assessed for fitness and propriety. The issue here is the Secretary of State’s decision to add persons or categories to the list without constraint, restriction or proper scrutiny. I would be grateful if the Minister could address these points when she replies.