My Lords, I join the cavalcade of congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, on his new role. We on these Benches look forward to working constructively with him; having witnessed what he did on at least one other Bill when I was opposite him, there is lots of room for us to build on that and work with him.
This is a Grand Committee but I will try to avoid grandstanding. I just want to lay out a modus operandi, if you like, from these Benches for how we shall take this Committee stage. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, and others, we do not need convincing that this legislation is necessary. That is the starting point. We believe that this is an important Bill but we are disappointed—as I am sure the Committee has already heard and will hear again—about the choice of such skeletal, paving legislation to deliver it.
Like the relevant committees of your Lordships’ House, we believe that the balance leans toward the secondary legislation route far more than it should. I will not use the same socio-religious language that the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, just used; I will use guard- rails rather than commandments. There need to be guard-rails in this legislation. There are other issues around alignment, which will come up mostly in the fourth group of amendments, but the bulk of our discussions will be on guard-rails—that is, what guidance should be in the legislation so that, when secondary legislation comes, it has some sense of purpose around what we are seeking to achieve. That will be our approach.
I shall now speak to Amendments 113 and 133; I thank the noble Lords, Lord Sharpe and Lord Anderson, for their support. I should say that, in a debate on a different Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, described me as a nuisance. Now, he has described me as a softie. I am not sure that I shall welcome his support in future, but the point is that we are trying to find a middle way. In a sense, I agree with some of what the noble Lords, Lord Frost and Lord Anderson, said: we are somewhere in the middle with the amendment, so perhaps we are finding the right place for it.
As we have heard, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee was very clear about this Bill; I have chosen different quotes from everybody else, thank heavens. The committee said:
“We recognise the need for this Bill to delegate some legislative powers”.
So do we. It continued:
“However … skeleton legislation should only be used in the most exceptional circumstances and where no other approach would be reasonable to adopt. This is because … it ‘signifies an exceptional shift in power from Parliament to the executive and entails the Government, in effect, asking Parliament to pass primary legislation which is so insubstantial that it leaves the real operation of the legislation to be decided by Ministers’”.
That is the guard-rail I was talking about.
We had this debate so many times in the previous Parliament. In a sense, it is disappointing that we are having it again. The DPRRC said that
“the Bill provides for almost all of the substance of product regulation and metrology to be provided for by Ministers in regulations under the new powers, and little or nothing to be settled under the fuller Parliamentary scrutiny given to Bill provisions”.
The DPRRC said that it remained concerned, and we have heard about those concerns, that
“so little of the policy is included in this skeleton Bill and so much is instead left to delegated legislation which will be subject to a much lower level of Parliamentary scrutiny”.
We know that, and have debated it many times. In some cases, some might say that it gets almost no real, meaningful parliamentary scrutiny, as long as statutory instruments cannot be amended. As the committee said:
“Parliament will be unable to amend that delegated legislation and the only options available to both Houses will be to accept it or reject it”.
We know that rejection, essentially, never happens.
We have also heard that the scope of these powers is not constrained by any requirements for consultation, for criteria to be met or for meaningful preconditions to be satisfied. That is why I am proposing Amendment 133, with the noble Lords’ support. I will say a little more about that shortly.
5.15 pm
For the DPRRC,
“the delegation to Ministers of law-making powers in this Bill involves legislative power shifting to an unacceptable extent from the democratically appointed legislature to the Executive”.
That is an important point for this Committee to dwell on.
Having discussed the report, the Minister failed to provide the DPRRC with convincing justification for the inclusion of the skeletal clauses in the Bill. So, despite the no doubt huge team the Minister had and his persuasive powers, I am afraid that the DPRRC was unable to be convinced of his arguments and, if that committee was not convinced, I suggest that this Committee should not be.