Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord Goodman of Wycombe

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Sharpe on his appointment. I support his Amendment 1 and apologise for not having had the opportunity to be present at Second Reading, but I am a member of the Delegated Powers Committee and thought that I would make a few points that arise from our report.

I join my noble friend Lord Jackson in thanking the Minister warmly for the courtesy that he has shown us and the time that he has spared us over the past few weeks. When the Minister came to the Select Committee, I got the short—or long—straw and was given the questions to ask about European alignment or divergence, so I went back over the Second Reading debate. I have no intention of repeating the arguments there but, essentially, I saw that my noble friends Lord Jackson of Peterborough, Lady Lawlor and Lord Frost all suggested that the Government had a policy of alignment, while it was suggested by some on the Government Benches and Cross Benches that it would be better to have a policy of alignment rather than one of divergence.

I note in passing that UK in a Changing Europe has now produced a report which suggests that the Government are moving towards some form of alignment. If I heard the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, correctly in the Chamber during Oral Questions, that seemed to be the general flavour of his answers. My concern is not to get into the policy issue. It is simply to make the point that the Minister may be correct that the Government have no intention of having a policy of either alignment or divergence, but will simply take each regulatory decision as it comes. Even so, Ministers and policy can change.

What we have run across here is, as my noble friend Lord Jackson said, a gap in scrutiny that has arisen since we left the European Union and now that Bill Cash’s committee in the Commons, which used to examine European legislation, is no longer present. I say this in no spirit of party-political animus. After all, my party has been in government for a period since Brexit and has not corrected the position, but the Government now in office have a chance to correct it.

It might be worth quoting, as I close, what the committee said in conclusion about the powers that the Government propose to take under the Bill. It said boldly:

“In our view, the delegation to Ministers of law-making powers in this Bill involves legislative power shifting to an unacceptable extent from the democratically appointed legislature to the Executive”.


We need some form of being able to scrutinise the decisions that a whole series of regulations may make, as well as to debate and decide whether they represent a policy of alignment or divergence, and to probe the matter. The solutions may lie in the ideas floated by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, a few moments ago or elsewhere, but there clearly is a gap. The committee has been concerned about similar gaps in legislation ever since it produced its Democracy Denied? report in 2021.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I too was unable to be at Second Reading, so this is my first occasion to make comment. I preface my further remarks by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Leong, for his courtesy and for arranging what I can describe only as a very impressive array of his officials and Bill team members—much better than I think I really deserve.

I have spent nearly 50 years in practice as a chartered surveyor and a lot of that time has been involved in construction. I will not dwell on things that will come up later, on Amendment 46 in my name, but construction is one of the areas where there is an absolute fog of commercial relationships over products, their use and their assembly, which it seems important to raise at this juncture. It is a fog of commercial relationships, collateral warranties, responsibilities, product substitution, legislation and oversight of one sort or another—or a lack of it, as the case may be. Of course, the whole question of building safety has been very much in the news recently.

Turning to the report of the Select Committee on this Bill, I am taken by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, because she gets to the nub of the issue about consumer safety. Who are we doing this for? That must ultimately be the focus. Looking at the mural at the far end of the Room and noting Moses handing down the tablets, I get a sort of 10 commandments moment here, but I am not going to bore the Committee with 10 of them because I have only eight.

First, items should be of merchantable quality. There has to be a duty of care, especially to end users: those whom one can expect to have to use them in real life. Those who put them together may be a stage on the way but they are not the end user. Secondly, they have to be fit for the purpose stated, including their durability. Thirdly, they have to be correctly and comprehensively described, without descriptions that mislead or confuse. Fourthly, they have to be adequately and independently tested, and assessed for their purposes as intended—and where have we seen that fall down?

Fifthly, they have to be installed or assembled as recommended for their intended application, and there needs to be a clear audit trail for how that happens. The more complicated and risk-sensitive the outcome is—I suspect that in the case of buildings and construction, particularly residential buildings, that is a very high risk if you get it wrong—then it has to be assessed accordingly. Sixthly, there has to be adequacy of oversight. That is fundamental. Seventhly, there has to be effective enforcement, with clear responsibilities and duties and a means of making sure that that can be checked and regularly revisited. Finally, there have to be consequences for infractions and culpable non-observance, in the same way as there were some years ago for health and safety at work. A regime of strict liability with consequences at corporate and director level sharpened up everybody’s act no end and produced a substantial improvement in casualty and death rates, particularly in construction.

That is the analysis that should be involved in dealing with this Bill. If you have a paving Bill, you have to make clear rules. We still have the 10 commandments with us. What is it about “Thou shalt not bear false witness” that is not understood? These things have to be durable, they have to survive changes in political tone and international relationships, and they have to survive scrutiny at the level that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, will be familiar with; that is, of the courts and of people who are experts in examining these things.

At this stage, it is relevant to talk about these many amendments—I broadly support the thrust of what they are doing—and set them in the context of getting the simple arithmetic right because if we drill down too much into the detail, we will try to second-guess what a Secretary of State may try to do somewhere down the line when the circumstances are different. If we can get those core principles right, this will endure and be of genuine benefit and use for future generations.