Healthcare (International Arrangements) Bill

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 19th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I associate myself entirely with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane. We have been here before. We went through these issues many times last year, when a number of us spoke about constitutional issues. I want to concentrate my remarks there today. Before doing so, I add my welcome to my noble friend on the Front Bench. I am sure that she will have a distinguished career in your Lordships’ House. I was extremely sorry to miss her Second Reading speech but I was recovering from surgery, so I could not be present and take part as I would have otherwise sought to do.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, are members of a group that I have the privilege of chairing: the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber. I want to reflect on those words for a few moments. You can have a truly effective second Chamber in a Parliament, or indeed an effective first Chamber, only if you do not have an overbearing Executive. Everything that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, have said underlines the fact that we are in extremely dangerous territory.

Of course, as they have done, I entirely absolve my noble friend on the Front Bench. She has been given a poisoned chalice and she will handle it with dexterity and finesse, but whatever she does, she will not be able to remove the hemlock and replace it with quaffable wine because this really is a very dangerous Bill. The name of Henry VIII has already been quoted a number of times—and even Henry XVI, although I am not quite sure what he will be up to. But I prefer to call this Bill a carte blanche Bill because what we are being asked to do is to give the Executive a totally blank cheque. That is inimical to constitutional parliamentary democracy. There has been a great deal of talk recently, and there will be more next week, about the role of Parliament vis-à-vis the Executive. We have to have a proper balance, but we do not have a proper balance if we have an Executive invested with so much power that Parliament really counts for nothing.

Of course, I know why we are going to have to give this Bill a speedy passage, but I deeply regret it. It goes against the parliamentary grain as far as I am concerned. In the almost 49 years that I have been in one House or the other, I have seen what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, referred to as the steady accretion of power to the Executive branch. No lip service to the power of Parliament paid by the setting up of Back-Bench committees and all the rest of it has really disguised that. It is one of the reasons why colleagues in another place have recently been flexing their muscles in seeking to wrest back power from the Executive to Parliament. I will not pursue that argument now because, frankly, in a Committee stage it would be straying out of order. But what I will say to your Lordships is that if we give this Bill its passage, as I suppose we must, it is crucial that we redouble our resolve to ensure that this sort of thing happens less frequently in the future.

In a parliamentary democracy there has to be a true balance of power and a responsibility to scrutinise legislation, but how can you scrutinise legislation which is so open-ended that it gives unbridled power for years to come? The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, referred to that. I do not want to trespass on the private grief of friends opposite—and I do regard them as friends—but do I really want powers like these to be exercised by Mr McDonnell or Mr Corbyn? No, I do not, and I suspect that there are very few, if any, in your Lordships’ House who do.

I therefore put down a marker in total support of the eloquence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and say that when we have got over the next few traumatic weeks, if we get over them—I suppose we will—we must send an emphatic message to the Executive that this sort of sharp practice is something up with which we will not put.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I welcome the Minister. I will not add to her burdens by trying to find another metaphor for the difficult position she is in. We have had poisoned chalices and hand grenades, but I am sure she would be more than capable of dealing with all that. I am sure she will already have picked up some of the deep frustrations in the Committee about the position we find ourselves in—having to deal with legislation that is, frankly, rather surreal. We are trying to deal with the worst possible scenarios just in time, just in case we should need to be as draconian as necessary in the most extreme emergency situations. We are focusing on the exercise of powers that may never need to be used but which we may have to reach for in the most ghastly circumstances—so we are over a barrel. This is an essential Bill. We have to protect UK citizens from the worst that could happen to them, having sadly neglected to do what we could have done at the very beginning of this two-year process and given them assurances and the sort of security—as we would have been expected to be able to offer EU citizens in this country—that many in this House tried to achieve.

My speech in support of the amendment moved by my noble friend will be much shorter, because I can do hardly anything other than compliment the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, on his most forensic and splendid interpretation of what the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee said, and my colleague on that committee, the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane. The one thing on which I might take issue with him is that in that committee we have not, in fact, become habituated to the ways in which government departments always try to take more power. We are not naive but we deeply resent the ways in which government departments have tried to accumulate powers over the past few years and to sneak it under our noses.

Coming down the track we have Bills—the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, has already referred to them—with swathes of inappropriate delegation cultivated by civil servants and Ministers, for whom, frankly, this is Christmas. They have wanted to acquire these sorts of powers for years and have tried on many different occasions. They have been stopped in Bill after Bill and sent back. But now they have the power of post-Brexit uncertainty to aid them. It is extremely difficult to know where our vocabulary might lead us next. It is a fabulous opportunity, because for years they have chafed against the boring predictability of our scrutiny committees telling them to go away and think again. They come back with excuses about urgency, technicalities and flexibilities, yet when we expose these for what they are, they tend to try to do it again in another form.

One of the most disappointing things is that this was our second report; our first was blunt enough. We thought that between November and now the department and Ministers would respond more sensitively—perhaps more in the spirit of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, with our agonised discussions over the fine-tuning of appropriateness and necessity—but we received not a word; not a blink. I am sad to say that what the department came back with—I know the Minister was not responsible—was another 43 paragraphs about all manner of explanations, most of which were not relevant. They did not address the fundamental question that the Committee is raising this afternoon: why are these powers necessary? What is it that only these powers will be able to achieve? The Minister was very flattering to the scrutiny committees at Second Reading; she called our powers “forensic”. There is nothing that needs forensic scrutiny here. You could take a spade to this Bill; it is that blunt.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

That is a separate issue. As I said at the beginning, the issue here is actually in two parts. The first is whether we ought to use the new legislation to strike deals with a subset of countries, those with which we already have reciprocal deals through our membership of the EU, or to strike broader ones. The secondary question is: what ought to be the correct process for Parliament to provide scrutiny of the kind of deals that are set up, either to provide continuity with the ones that we have under the EU or with new partners? Those are different questions. It is up to this Committee to make its decision about what it feels is the appropriate route to go forward, but it is important to expose that those are different and separate questions and we ought to consider them as such.

Perhaps I may respond to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and others about trade. It is absolutely not the case that this is some Trojan horse for privatisation of the NHS, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said, or anything else. My noble friend the Minister made that completely clear in her letter, as I used to in the letters that I once sent the noble Lord as well. Consider this: one of the reasons that we have deep reciprocal healthcare agreements with EU countries is due to the fact that we are part of a large trading bloc called the European Union. It is perfectly normal for partners engaged in economic, social, cultural, scientific and other activities to have these kind of agreements, partly because they facilitate the movement of people from one to another, whether on holiday or for work and other things.

I would hope, regardless of whether we were leaving the European Union or not, that we would want to have these kind of agreements with our partner countries throughout the world. Regardless of one’s views on Brexit, we ought to want to do that. It is not something that we have the legal basis to do at the moment and the Bill gives us that. I want to correct the impression given by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, which I do not think is fair, that this is somehow a Trojan horse for some sort of nefarious agenda. That is absolutely not the case; it is about taking a broader view of the kind of relationships that we currently enjoy with the EU and want to enjoy with other countries, whether they are Commonwealth partners or the overseas territories and Crown dependencies noted by my noble friend Lord Ribeiro.

I hope that I have described clearly what I believe the intent is in this regard. It is absolutely noble and will facilitate the broader movement of people throughout the world.

[Baroness Andrews]

I take the noble Lord’s personal assurances on that. Who could disagree with what he has just said about the need to have these sorts of vigorous, expansive and generous trading arrangements, which we hope will involve skills, health and knowledge? My question is really: why are these powers in this Bill? If they are necessary and within our reach, why can we not have them in an appropriate Bill with appropriate powers, which we can all be certain will not be exploited and lead to perverse consequences?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I take the noble Baroness’s point but the critical thing here is that the powers set out in the Bill are constrained by giving effect to healthcare agreements, which themselves sit under the aegis of the creation of international agreements. My noble friend’s letter set out how the entire so-called CRaG arrangements govern how they ought to be approved. To satisfy my noble friend Lord Cormack’s concern, it is simply not the case that this Bill could be used unilaterally to fund the healthcare of the people of Venezuela, which might be a concern of the leaders of the Labour Party, as he pointed out.