Deregulation Bill

Debate between Baroness Andrews and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, as a Member of the Joint Committee I support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and commend him for the indefatigable way he has brought this issue back on Report. I can confirm that the Joint Committee was exercised about this failure, this deliberate resistance, by the Government to consider the Law Commission for all the reasons the noble Lord set out—transparency, reduction of risk and uncertainty and the opportunity to consider the repeals which were being recommended.

Let me take the House back to the first stages of this Bill, when there was something in the spirit of the original clause which was dropped from the eventual Bill, whereby the Minister was going to take upon himself the power to decide which legislation was or was not redundant and to recommend that a whole swathe of legislation should actually disappear from the statute book. Such was the reaction to that that the clause was wisely dropped.

As to the attitude towards the Law Commission, I do not quite understand the difficulty. As the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, said, the Law Commission was absolutely clear that it would be able to deal with and expedite the passage of judgment on the repeals and it would give everyone the security of knowing that whatever was moved for repeal would have that additional scrutiny. That is not to cast aspersions on the ability of departments to make a judgment about what is or is not redundant legislation, but as we have got the Law Commission and that is part of its job, we should take advantage of that expertise and the scope to do that. On that basis, I certainly support the amendment.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I wish to make three points and I shall end with a question to the Minister.

First, we should record at some point in our proceedings the considerable debt we owe to the Joint Committee for its work in the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, for the work it has done since then in trying to feed into our debates and discussions the intelligence it had gained and the knowledge that it had as a result of that process, as exemplified by my noble friend Lady Andrews’s comments. It once again proves the need for Parliament to think harder about how it gets its legislation together. There is no doubt that, in comparison with a couple of other Bills that I have been involved in recently, the Deregulation Bill is in much better shape. Even though it is a much longer, more complex, Christmas tree-type Bill that has come through, we have found it easier to deal with. If we ever discussed how we do these things, we would conclude that it has been done better.