European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Baroness Young of Old Scone

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 12th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I have Amendments 111, 137 and 192 in this group and share the unhappiness that has just been described. Mine is a narrow but, I think, important point.

The thrust of most of the amendments in the group —not the noble Viscount’s—is about consultation and transparency. You do not have to spend long working in Parliament to realise that scrutiny very much depends on the input of stakeholders—I hate the term but I cannot think of a better one at this time of night. They assist us to understand how things work in practice, both with technicalities and wider issues. That is not to say that I do not have great admiration for parliamentary counsel and the lawyers working in the departments, who are most concerned with statutory instruments, but my amendments would require consultation on the regulations provided for by Clauses 7 to 9. This should all be a co-operative venture, with stakeholders contributing at an early stage, not least for the reason that the regulations are statutory instruments and not open to amendment, so you have to get it right from the very start.

I was a member for some time of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which received a lot of very valuable representations—lobbying, if you like. I suspect we will not hear comments in support of Amendment 228 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, about the Cabinet Office code, but I support the application of the code to the regulations. We may well be told that of course the code will apply. I have to say that in my time on the committee, we undertook quite a lot of work on the application of the code in practice and were quite critical of the responses we received from the Cabinet Office. One of our criticisms was that when consultation was undertaken—which it was not always—on the statutory instruments we were considering, the Government did not publish the responses to the consultation before they published the statutory instrument, so the work was not as helpful as it should have been.

Other amendments in this group are more detailed. Mine is not very elegant. I am not proprietorial about it but I wanted to raise the subject because some provision is necessary and, if I may say so, appropriate. It is a step that is very easy to miss out and I hope we will not be told that all the regulations in question are simply about technicalities and that stakeholders would have nothing to add to the exercise. Practitioners in almost every area may see what is workable in proposals being put forward, as well as substantive points.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 227A in my name, which is also supported by the noble Lords, Lord Lisvane, Lord Tyler and Lord Judd. The amendment is intended to be helpful to the Minister, although it is unlikely that he will regard anything as helpful at this time of night. Nevertheless, it is intended in the spirit of helpfulness to ensure that the statutory instruments that the Government are proposing turn out to be correct and effective. Many of the changes made by the statutory instruments will be technical and potentially uncontroversial but some will involve policy choices. The aim of my amendment is to ensure wider consultation on statutory instruments before they are formally laid.

The nature of the challenge is quite severe. There will be an awful lot of them—potentially 1,000. I have been looking primarily in the last year at the number that will be required in Defra alone—over 100—on environmental issues. They will need to come thick and fast, and in many cases they are being dealt with in departments by staff who have only recently been recruited. Having seen these departments shrink in times of austerity, lots of people are now being recruited, some of whom are old faithfuls but some of whom are rather new and probably not as well acquainted with the policy area as we would like.

So there is a risk of two things: one is cock-up, if noble Lords will pardon the unparliamentary language—things just going wrong because of the sheer volume and pace; and the other is conspiracy. A large number of the Defra SIs will be roll-ups of a whole variety of issues. I am being ignoble in suggesting that the Government might hide under a pile of harmless stuff the odd thing with a slight curveball in it, but increased transparency and consultation would help reassure people that no fast ones were being tried.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out—and it is inalienable—that the process of both the affirmative and the negative procedures means that once measures are formally laid there is very little room for manoeuvre, so it is important that this consultation happens in advance. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, for his letter of 20 February, following Second Reading. It provided more information but offered only that the Government would make efforts to publish a sample of statutory instruments in draft where appropriate. That rather misses the point, which is to let loose on these drafts expert eyes from across a variety of sectors of stakeholders to help the Government with that checking process to make sure that nothing has been missed, there has not been a cock-up and the policy intentions have not been perverted in any way. I hope the Minister will consider this and see it as a genuinely helpful proposal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Young of Old Scone]

I am not sure that the evidence stacks up on that. I have been seeking clarification from Defra for over a year now on just a simple list of the issues that might be subject to statutory instrument, and I have been unable to get that from the department. Perhaps the Minister might like to prod departments to reflect the terms she just stated.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I too asked for a list of necessary statutory instruments from the Home Office, and the Parliamentary Answer was that the work had not been done to calculate the number.