Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Foster of Bath

Monday 25th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I shall briefly follow the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane. At Second Reading, I and many other people acknowledged that there were some very good bits in the Bill before us at that time. However, we pointed out that there were also many bits about which we had considerable concern. There are at least some areas where deliberation in your Lordships’ House has brought about improvements to those areas where we had concern. I, too, pay tribute to the Minister and her colleagues on the Front Bench for the way in which they have been willing to listen and bring forward amendments in the light of our deliberations.

However, none of that can take away from the fact that the Bill has been presented, not only in another place but more recently to your Lordships’ House, in a pretty poor state. Because I am relatively new to your Lordships’ House, I turned to my elders and betters to see what they have thought about it. As we come to the end of the deliberations on this legislation, it is worth reflecting what your Lordships’ Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has had to say about the Bill—not only when it first received it but subsequently, after various deliberations had taken place.

I note that, in its 27th report, the committee says:

“This Bill has given rise to a particularly large number of comments and recommendations … It is also disappointing that we have felt it necessary to comment adversely on aspects of the delegated powers memoranda provided by the department”.

It described those memoranda as “variable in quality” and pointed out that in relation to some parts of the Bill,

“no delegated powers memorandum was provided at all”.

When the Government responded to the committee’s initial findings, the committee then had to point out that:

“It is a matter of regret that the Government’s response to this Bill … gives us cause for continued concern in that a number of our recommendations received no comment at all”.

The committee made the point that many Members of your Lordships’ House have made many times over many weeks, when it said that,

“we would observe again that these provisions are being presented to the House before the underlying policy is sufficiently developed to afford Members a clear basis for discussing it”.

In its 28th report, the committee amplified that in saying:

“Inadequate and incomplete provisions of … primary legislation cannot be excused on the basis that consultation has not taken place or that the Government wish to retain ‘flexibility to set out differing timeframes as they apply in different contexts’”.

The committee concludes:

“The policy should have been finalised following appropriate consultation before, not after, the Bill was introduced”.

One can read so many other comments from the report:

“We draw this apparent ambiguity to the attention of the House … We draw this lack of clarity to the attention of the House … That seems to us to be a very unusual requirement, and we draw it to the attention of the House”,

and so on. It is “not persuaded”, it does not regard this as being remotely persuasive, and so the report goes on.

It is perfectly reasonable for people to propose a sunrise clause as a way of simply putting off legislation with which they disagree, and we on these Benches disagree with bits of this legislation. However, the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, has made a much more fundamental point about why there should be a sunrise clause, which is simply that the work has not yet been done. Until the work has been done and draft regulations are put before the House and we have an opportunity to know that that consultation has taken place and to understand what the Government mean by some of the definitions we have not yet heard, it seems perfectly reasonable to propose, as the noble Lord and others have done, that we have a sunrise clause to put off the introduction of this legislation until the Government have done the work that they should have done before presenting the Bill to this House.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I also support these amendments. I hope that the House will forgive me if I say that I have been in this House for 25 years and handled a number of Bills on both sides of the Benches, both for the Government and the Opposition. There are often cases where, as with the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act, there was a real need for something that was essentially broad brush to get resolutions coming from below, and we accepted that.

However, leaving that aside, in process terms—I am not talking about content, and it is absolutely not the fault of the Minister and her colleagues on the Front Bench—this is the worst Bill I have come across in my fields in 25 years. That is because we have not had pre-legislative scrutiny or proper legislative scrutiny and, because the consultation exercises which should have been completed before the Bill started will not be completed until after the Bill has finished, we will not get post-legislative scrutiny. What does it mean to talk about this House of Lords being a place of scrutiny when we cannot scrutinise because so much of what we need to know will not only not be in primary legislation, but will also not be in statutory instruments which we will see draft copies of before the Bill is complete? Why is that? They are dependent on consultation exercises, which were only started in some cases half way through not the proceedings down the other end but the proceedings in this House. This is disgraceful. It is a shabby way to treat Parliament and all those affected by the Bill—and hundreds of thousands of council tenants will be affected by it, as well as many people who will seek to buy starter homes, and they still do not know the small print of how it will be. It is a shabby way to treat the public.

It is fairly obvious that the Bill was introduced a year too early. It should have been pulled fairly early by the current equivalent of LegCo. Ministers should have been sent away and told to come back to both Houses when the Bill’s policy intent was clear, so that stuff that is of major policy import, not matters of detail, is not carried by SIs—which we are told we cannot amend but only discuss; we might just as well go home and not bother for that purpose—instead of being in the Bill, where we can amend it, dispute and argue with the House of Commons and, ultimately, of course, accept that it has the final say. That has been denied to us.

We are moving on to Third Reading, and I cannot recall being so unhappy about the handling of the process of a Bill, and, as I said, I have been involved with quite a number of Bills. I am not talking about the Minister, who has been as accommodating, helpful and generous with her time as possible. We have failed to scrutinise the Bill. We have allowed ourselves to be committed to a process which we should have rejected as inadequate, because the Bill was not ready for parliamentary scrutiny. We have all allowed ourselves to collude in that failure of scrutiny, and I have to say that I am ashamed of it.