I beg my noble friend’s pardon. Perhaps there is a reason why the departments might favour a slower, stepwise and consultative approach. We have also tabled an amendment that opposes Clause 1 standing part of the Bill. That is to give time to have that stepwise, considered and consultative approach, as many of us believe it should be. It removes the sunset altogether and it gives us time. Clearly, this element of the Bill, if not the others, was the product of the imagination of the Conservative MP for North East Somerset. This Bill is a legacy from his short-lived time in BEIS and, like almost everything produced in that thankfully brief period of administration, it delivers chaos and an unworkable Bill. The Government Front Bench might appreciate our help in removing this very difficult thing, for what will become a very difficult effort.
Finally in this group, my noble friend Lady Ludford and I have tabled Amendment 50, which seeks to deliver a super-affirmative process. I should point out that the dash comes between “super” and “affirmative”; it is the affirmation that is super, not the process. The process is for revoking EU-derived subordinate legislation or retained direct EU legislation. It was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, earlier. Once again, this is about parliamentary scrutiny. The amendment seeks to address the huge democratic shortcomings of this Bill, as outlined by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. In the “Bypassing Parliament” section of its report, the committee observes:
“The Bill gives to Ministers (rather than Parliament) the power to decide, in relation to a considerable amount of REUL, what is to be … revoked and not replaced … revoked and replaced with something broadly similar … revoked and replaced with something very different, or … retained.”
That is, in a nutshell, what we are discussing. The committee also noted:
“Parliament will not know, at the time it grants the powers, what the Government intend to do with those powers.”
I will not dwell on this amendment to create the super-affirmative process, except to highlight a couple of features. The first, under proposed new subsection (2), is:
“For each instrument that is proposed to be revoked, a Minister of the Crown must lay before Parliament … a draft of the regulations; and … a document which explains the draft regulations.”
As the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, said, there is a period of 30 days for this process.
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Proposed new subsection (5) sets out:
“In preparing a draft statutory instrument containing the regulations, a Minister of the Crown must take account of … any representations … any resolution of either House of Parliament; and … any recommendations of a committee under subsection (4)”,
which is about the committees to which the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, referred. This is a process of taking the Bill and trying to add a little democracy. The wider amendments that we discussed earlier are taking a larger slice of democracy, which I favour, but this has to be done at the very least.
At the end of Committee on the Professional Qualifications Bill, it was clear that there were huge problems at the heart of it. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, stood up and agreed with that. He then said—and I believe this is a quote—“We have to take this Bill on a holiday”. That is what the noble Lord did and the Bill was substantially revised and massively improved over that period of reflection, before it came back on Report. The Government Front Bench could think about that process very hard, because we are dealing with an even more substandard Bill here than we had with the Professional Qualifications Bill.