Agriculture Bill

Debate between Earl of Lindsay and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool)]

It may help the House to understand what is going on if I clarify that the debate is now on Amendment 28. We will continue with the speakers’ list, as written down, for this group. At the end, after the Minister has spoken, I will call the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, to respond to Amendment 28.

[The Earl of Lindsay (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I support everything that my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has said in moving Amendment 18, so I shall be brief. I added my name to this amendment for reasons I outlined at Second Reading. It is irregular for a Bill—even for a framework enabling Bill—to be sent to Parliament without any sort of formal impact assessment. It is yet more irregular for a Bill of this consequence not to be accompanied by a primary stage impact assessment at the very least.

For well over a decade, successive Governments of different political hues, have for good reason seen the requirement for departments to produce impact assessments alongside proposals for new legislation as central to their commitment to better regulation. Accompanying impact assessments enable parliamentary and stakeholder scrutiny of proposed new legislation to be better informed. Parliamentary and stakeholder scrutiny further benefits from impact assessments because of the role of the RPC, which my noble friend mentioned. The RPC is the government-appointed Regulatory Policy Committee which independently assesses the quality of a departmental impact assessment of the costs, benefits, risks and opportunities of a proposed new measure. It then publishes an opinion, which is available to Parliament and others, on whether the evidence and analysis contained in the impact assessment are sufficient to support whatever is being proposed. As my noble friend said, it is an essential and valuable discipline. It helps Parliament, Ministers and the departments themselves.

I am glad to say that it is rare nowadays for a department to produce legislation without an accompanying impact assessment, but it has happened in the case of the Agriculture Bill. This omission is especially regrettable, given the varying impacts of the wide-ranging measures that this Bill proposes to enable. That is why I have put my name to this amendment.