My Lords, I thank the Minister for his apology at the beginning, which I believe to be sincere and heartfelt. I also thank him, I think, for his introduction of the first of these 50 amendments; it was relatively short, given that they come with little explanation. It is said that there is a productivity crisis
in this country—not so in the Cabinet Office amendment-generation department. The Minister can be proud of its performance.
More seriously, I commend the Bill team and the Government Whips’ Office, who have been wrestling with this leviathan of amendments, not least over the weekend. I thank them for their hard work. I will return to the process we are facing after making a few comments on the amendments, particularly around the covered procurement element.
Amendment 1 and several others seek to clarify things by defining covered procurement. I remain confused about where this phrase comes from and why it was necessary. There was no sense from the Minister’s introduction as to why it was necessary to come back after Second Reading with a new phrase. Can he say where this term comes from? Is it employed elsewhere in legislation? I think it is in contract law but it was difficult to find other manifestations of it. I should remind the Minister that, every time a new term like this arrives in legislation, it proliferates a great deal of other legislation because each new word or term will be tested to the limit in the law. If we start bringing in new terms such as this, the Bill will be a lawyers’ enrichment fund—I can see the lawyer opposite nodding in agreement—and that is not a good thing for the country or for government.
In his discussions, the Minister said that many of these new amendments came from consultation that was subsequent to Second Reading. Avoiding the obvious question as to why Her Majesty’s Government did not consult more beforehand, I would like to know which organisations and individuals put forward the need for this change. My guess is that it was not an external force but an internal one, and possibly that the Cabinet Office, having used one lawyer, decided to use a different one who had a whole set of different opinions on the legal nature of the Bill, and that is where the vast majority of these amendments have come from. Far be it from me to say what the benefits are of changing a horse half way across a stream, but we are, I suspect, reaping the consequences. If I am wrong, I am happy for the Minister to tell us so or to publish the consultation that happened subsequent to Second Reading. I will be happy to admit that that was not the truth.
As we noted at Second Reading this is an important Bill, dealing as it does with the technical process for managing a considerable amount of money spent on behalf of the British people by public institutions. We support this process. We noted that it needs to be in the public interest, as well as providing value for money. The objective of this Committee process should be, and should remain, to have a proper debate around how such issues are brought to the fore in this legislation. However, because of the sheer incompetence of the Cabinet Office—a Cabinet Office that, I note, recently published its guide to improving the quality of the legislative process—we are instead pulled into a debate around process.
During Second Reading, there seemed to be a measure of good will. My noble friend Lord Wallace spoke about the need for a co-operative process and the Minister seemed to agree. Subsequently, as the Minister has pointed out, with fewer than four days before the first day in Grand Committee, we were confronted
with 350 government amendments. That could have been managed in a co-operative way, but that did not happen. Even if we had to have the amendments, to drop them with no warning so near to the process was an inappropriate way of being co-operative.
Then, at 8.56 am on Sunday, which I remind everybody was yesterday, we all received an updated grouping of amendments. In this, there were 77 changes from the document we had received on Friday—I repeat, 77 changes—with the shape of the groups radically changed. For Members to be presented with so many changes, and then for those changes to keep on moving, right up to the wire, is unacceptable. I stress again that this is not the fault of the Government Whips’ Office, which I suspect was kept at work all weekend thanks to this process and the Minister’s insistence that we plough on with the Bill in the way that was originally planned.
4 pm
In the House, the Chief Whip made much about the availability of the Keeling schedule, as did the Minister. As your Lordships know, this is essentially a marked-up or tracked version of the Bill. As far as I am aware, it has not been made available in a printed version and has been circulated by email only to interested parties. I will take correction if it has now been made public.