My Lords, I have not contributed at all in this Committee and I am going to say only a very few words, which I hope I can keep as simple as possible. I very much support Amendment 69A here, because I think it is particularly relevant. I hope it is of help to my noble friend the Minister, who last week dismissed out of hand Amendment 44, to which I had added my name. I hope he will understand that I am trying to be helpful in supporting this. With the legal uncertainty that we seem to have here, it is terribly important that the Government, and indeed Ministers, protect themselves in some way.
The suggestion last week was that we should have a commission set up for the purposes of looking at these proposals and at what effect they might have, and move them to parliamentary scrutiny in the appropriate manner. Now we have a proposal in subsection 2 of the proposed new clause introduced by Amendment 69A that would make it a condition that
“a Minister of the Crown has asked the Law Commission”,
as it is presently constituted,
“to report on the effect of … this Act on legal certainty, and the clarity and predictability of the law.”
I am sure I do not need to remind my noble friend of the importance of certainty, and how important it is in the law to have that. We do not have so many comparisons here. I use the term “void for uncertainty” in relation to legislation. For instance, in the United States, all legislation that is “void for vagueness”, as is the term, cannot proceed. In the European Union, it is quite clear that there has to be clear certainty in the imposition of laws on the people who have to obey and follow them. Here we have a situation where we have nothing of the sort. It is important, therefore, that the Government find a way in which they can, if necessary, protect themselves; otherwise, we are going to get in due course a considerable amount of legal interest, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, just referred to. Whether that is through judicial review or other means, it will be so complex and convoluted that, while it might please some lawyers, other lawyers such as myself, of a rather more modest disposition, would find it quite appalling to see this happen. I ask my noble friend perhaps not to dismiss this amendment quite as easily as he dismissed Amendment 44.
Throughout the proceedings I have watched so far in Committee, there have been many references to the democracy which is necessary—and that the Government wish to pursue—compared with the lack of democracy that the Government allege in the European Union. As a Member of the European Parliament—as my noble friend the Minister was too, although for a shorter period—I think it is very difficult to make out a good case for a lack of democracy in the work that was done by me and my other colleagues from Britain in the European Parliament. This is particularly the
case in recent years where the European Parliament has had co-decision and a right to block legislation from the Commission. The proposals of the Government at the moment—if they are not put to some form of independent assessment—would leave us with a situation where the secondary legislation lacks every single shred of evidence of democracy. Therefore, I ask my noble friend to seriously consider conceding Amendment 69A when he comes to respond.