Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Noakes and Lord McLoughlin

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to offer a brief comment on Amendment 76 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead. Like many Members of your Lordships’ House, I find the way in which we deal with the increasing amount of secondary legislation fundamentally unsatisfactory. I pay tribute to the work done by my noble friends Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Blencathra and their respective committees last year, and to the important debate held in your Lordships’ House.

We should move towards re-examining how we handle secondary legislation going forward. However, I do not think that the right way forward is to produce one amendment in one Bill and try to say that it answers the problem. I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, because of his tremendous experience in the other place. But let us not pretend it is easy to find a good solution that will work with both Houses and produce the right degree of additional scrutiny without completely holding up the Government’s secondary legislation programme.

We should take time—I hope the Government will find time—to work between both Houses to find good, practical solutions going forward, but we should not legislate in haste in this Bill. We have secondary legislation procedures that have served us pretty well for a long time. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, referred to needing to deal with flaws in secondary legislation. They can already be dealt with; they do not need any special apparatus to do so. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, referred to the procedure whereby statutory instruments are withdrawn when flaws are pointed out. That is a part of our existing procedure, and it works perfectly well. Let us not pretend it is so broken that we have to invent a special procedure for the Bill.

[Lord McLoughlin (Con)]

My Lords, my name appears on Amendments 15 and 76, spoken to by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. Following what my noble friend Lady Noakes has just said, I say: if not now, when?

It is clear from this debate so far that we sometimes feel that somehow all this European legislation was forced on us and we never wanted it. The simple fact is that we would have had to legislate for a lot of it ourselves. Actually, what happened was that sometimes it was gold-plated—not by Europe but by us. One thing we must be careful not to see happen now is future regulations coming forward and being gold-plated without Ministers necessarily realising what has possibly happened.

I have been fortunate in serving as a Secretary of State. I must admit: I cannot say that, when officials came to me and said that we would take something through on delegated powers, I said, “Well, I must really examine every last word of that particular piece of legislation”.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

Shame!

[Lord McLoughlin (Con)]

Yes, of course, shame—absolutely a shame. I completely accept what my noble friend is saying. It is a shame and a disgrace, but sometimes you get such a number of regulations coming forward that you might just let them believe what you are saying because you know you are not going to have to defend it in Parliament. That is something that I think my noble friend Lord Hamilton said a few moments ago. It will make a Government more responsive if they feel they have to defend it on the Floor of either the House of Commons or your Lordships’ House.

That is why we have had several debates, including, as my noble friend Lady Noakes said, the earlier debate as a result of the Delegated Powers Committee—which I now chair following my noble friend Lord Blencathra—and the committee chaired by my noble friend Lord Hodgson. It is a way to make sure that the Government are more accountable to the elected House as well as to your Lordships’ House, where we can also sometimes ask, “Has A or B been thought of?”. That is very much why I hope the Government will consider this in due course. As I said, the overall changes made to the Bill already are very welcome, but the number of changes, and the speed with which they have been made, makes us question, rightly, how well thought out the Bill was in the first instance.