My Lords, I will not detain the Committee for long. Obviously, my noble friend and the Front Bench team oppose Clause 10 standing part of the Bill, for very good reasons, as outlined by the Delegated Powers Committee. I shall just address the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, on this point: no one disputes that what the country and the Government wanted was a transition. They voted for a transition, returning to Parliament the powers to make laws. That was actually what was contained in the 2018 withdrawal Act, and we now have a policy
change: it will no longer be the responsibility of Parliament to revoke, retain or advise; it will be a government Minister.
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We have heard extracts from the committee’s report. These pieces of EU legislation are normally about very significant policy issues; it is not as if they are irrelevant regulations that we no longer need and can therefore be put in the bin. They tend to be on very important policy issues. Therefore, as the committee says, it is not about where they originate, it is what they are about. Parliament should therefore have the say about whether they are revoked, retained or revised.
Of course, saving parliamentary time, which is what the memorandum says, means that we are going to have these direct laws immediately put into the secondary legislation category so that we end up not being able to consider any amendments or revisions—we either accept or reject. What does that mean? If there is a desperate need to improve things, we cannot do that; we have to reject, and we end up with nothing. I have repeatedly said that this is not how we should be making laws. We should be reasserting the policy outlined in the 2018 Act.
Nobody is disputing the need to examine these things. I am not even disputing the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, about the timescale. We should move as speedily as we can, but it should not be on the basis of areas where a sunset clause will cause things to fall off, or of simply saying, “We need to speed up Parliament, and therefore to consider whether to accept or reject a Minister’s decision on important policy areas”. That is not what this Parliament is about. I hope the Minister will consider the views not only of the Committee but of the Delegated Powers Committee: is Clause 10 seriously necessary? It undermines exactly what I suspect people who voted for Brexit really wanted: for this Parliament to decide the UK’s laws.