Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Blencathra

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Wednesday 8th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, first, I apologise to my noble friend for wrongfooting him. I arrived about 15 minutes ago, having sent a message to the Front Bench earlier today that, since my train was going in slow motion because of wind on the line, I was likely to be here rather late. My message was to thank the Government, the Home Office and my noble friend Lady Williams of Trafford, who took on board the criticisms that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee made. I have the privilege of being chair of that committee for the next three weeks only—so the Government can rest in peace afterwards.

We made a large number of recommendations and, to be fair, the Home Office took them on board and my noble friend has accepted the majority of them. That is a good message to send to other departments. It goes to show that, when my committee makes recommendations, they can be accepted by the Government, because they do not sabotage the Bill or stop the political thrust of what the Government are trying to do. At the very most, our most extreme recommendations may mean that some bit of delegated powers legislation might be debated for 90 minutes in the affirmative procedure—never under the negative, unless it is prayed against—which will mean a Minister having to host a debate for 90 minutes. It will probably be a Lords Minister, because the Commons possibly will not bother. So it can be done.

The only substantive comment that I wish to make is about my noble friend using the standard excuse—although he used it in a more delicate way—that we hear from most departments when they refuse to accept that the guidance to which one must have regard should be seen by Parliament. Some departments take a much more arrogant attitude and say, “Oh, well, we publish lots of guidance every year and we consult the stakeholders and experts, so we don’t need to trouble you people in Parliament who know nothing about it”. That is not quite what they say, but that is the thrust of it. I had a tremendous success last week, when I had a two-word amendment accepted by the sponsor of the Bill and the department—and those two words were “by regulations”. The clause said that “guidance that must be followed will be issued”, and we inserted the words, “by regulations”. That made no difference to the practical effect of the Bill.

The other justification that we often hear is, “Oh, we issue a lot of guidance, you know, and it has to be changed rapidly”. I am not suggesting that it applies to this guidance, but a lot of that is simply not true. If the guidance has to be changed rapidly, it has to be printed and issued. All we say in that case is “Put it in a negative regulation which Parliament can see, and only those who have an interest, or the Opposition, may move a prayer against it”.

We issued a strong report last week, and so did my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. My committee issued a report complaining strongly about disguised legislation, where the Minister not only has power to issue his own regulations but they are called “directions”, “protocols” and so on. That is disguised legislation. We also complained about skeleton Bills. If you want to see a skeleton Bill, look at the new Bill on healthcare, where there are about 150 delegations. The Bill has no guts—that will be filled in by legislation later.

I hope that my noble friends will speak to the Department of Health and the Ministers there. I have no idea what our committee will report when we look at the Bill next week, but I suspect that we will be highly critical of the contents. I hope that my noble friend the Minister, coming from the Home Office, can tell the Department of Health to follow our example. If we in the Home Office, one of the mightiest departments of state, can accept the vast majority of suggestions from the Delegated Powers Committee, other departments can do so too, knowing that their legislation is safe. We do not sabotage it and we do not try to stop it. We have no political input on the merits of the Bill; we leave that to noble Lords here. However, we do care about inappropriate delegations.

Having read the riot act on that, I thank my noble friends on the Front Bench for the considerable changes that they have made on this—and I just wish that they would go a wee bit further and accept the last one.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, just illustrated the value of his service as chairman of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which the House should thank him for—but in the knowledge that his successor is unlikely to give the Government peace because this is an area where all Governments need to be brought up to the mark. His more wide-ranging report last week illustrates this, and I will refer to it briefly in a moment.

It is good to be in the part of the Bill where the Government have listened, both to the Delegated Powers Committee and to the House itself, where voices were raised, particularly on the issue of the publication of the strategy on serious violence for which provision is made in the Bill. It really does not make sense for a strategy to exist which is not published and which therefore cannot be the subject of accountability. That was quickly recognised by Ministers at the Dispatch Box here. They have acted in accordance with that and I very much welcome that. They have met the objections to publication by specifying areas in which there must be a bit more care about what should not be published because of adverse consequences for the public interest, over things such as custodial institutions and other ways in which material could be released in a way which would be damaging to the general public interest.

That is one area where I am pleased that the Government have listened. I am also pleased that in a number of respects, if not quite all, the Government have responded on issues of laying guidance before Parliament and on providing a parliamentary procedure, either negative or affirmative, for some of the instruments. I will say in passing, however, that laying guidance before Parliament is a bit of a formality. Unless Members of one House or the other find a way of debating it—it is a little easier in this House than the other—laying it before Parliament does not achieve anything practical, whereas having a procedure in the House, defective though the negative procedure is, is much more useful. In most respects that request has been met.

Producing a list of previous legislation which was deficient in this respect is not a persuasive answer to the challenging issues raised by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the Statutory Instruments Committee. It is generally recognised that there is a serious deficiency which has been allowed to grow as the scope of legislations has extended. Things which have the practical effect of legislation have become more numerous, but Parliament has not developed effective procedures to ensure good scrutiny and to ensure that the neo-legislation is in workable and legally sound form.

As the committee said in its wider report, if, because of modern conditions, Parliament is being asked to accept new ways of legislating, it is surely right that the Government must stand ready to accept new methods of scrutiny and of being held to account. So, like others, we take the view that there is now an urgent need to take stock and rebalance their relationship. This Bill has arrived at the beginning of that very important process, but it is encouraging that Ministers have at least responded in a number of key respects, and I welcome that.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Blencathra

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Monday 25th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, as chair of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I support Amendments 33 and 41 in my name. I intend to speak only once on the whole Bill, unless the spirit moves me via my noble friend the Minister’s reply. She will know that there were quite a few recommendations in the Delegated Powers Committee report, but I have put down just these two amendments.

If the Committee will permit, I will take the first minute to run through the more general criticism we made of the delegated powers in the Bill. I will not return to this subject again. In our response to the memorandum, we said:

“We are surprised and concerned at the large number of inappropriate delegations of power in this Bill … We are particularly concerned that the Bill would … allow Ministers—and even a non-statutory body—to influence the exercise of new police powers (including in relation to unauthorised traveller encampments and stop and search) through ‘guidance’ that is not subject to Parliamentary scrutiny … leave to regulations key aspects of new police powers—to restrict protest and to extract confidential information from electronic devices—that should instead be on the face of the Bill; and … allow the imposition of statutory duties via the novel concept of ‘strategy’ documents that need not even be published.”


That is the subject of the amendments before us today, and that is what I shall major on.

We concluded our general introduction by saying:

“We are disappointed that the inclusion of these types of delegations of power—on flimsy grounds—suggests that the Government have failed when preparing this Bill to give serious consideration to recommendations that we have made in recent reports on other Bills.”


That is fairly scathing condemnation, and it is a bit unfair on noble Lords in this Committee and from the Home Office, because they had nothing to do with drafting these provisions.

We all know how it happens. The Bill has come from another place; Ministers who have served in the Home Office and other departments will honestly admit this. I dealt with about 20 Bills when I was in the Home Office. The Bill team and civil servants would come in and say, “Here’s the Bill, Minister”, and we would look at the general politics of it. Then they would say, “Oh, by the way, there are some delegated powers there. When you’re ready to come back again to tweak it, we can deal with it”. We all said, “Yes, jolly good; carry on”, but never paid any attention to them. I am certain that the Bill team in the Commons—the civil servants drafting the Bill—did not, and nor did the Commons Ministers. It came here and this bunch of Lordships have got a bit upset, and I suspect others will too.

I say to my noble friend the Minister to go back, as other Lords Ministers have to do, and explain to Ministers in the Commons and the Bill team—the Bill team thinks it is sacrosanct; it has drafted it and does not like people mucking around with it—that that bunch up the Corridor will want some concessions. My political antennae tell me that on Report there may be a few amendments made by noble Lords on all sides—amendments I might not approve of at all—but if we want to get somewhere, the Commons should make concessions on this, because they are really sensible.

Before I comment on the two amendments, I will give one example. We criticise the provisions on serious disruption; I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, wishes to remove them from the Bill. We say in our report that the Government have been able to draft a half-page statutory instrument describing serious disruption. If the Government can draft it there, stick it in the Bill, for goodness’ sake, and then it can be amended later.

That is enough general criticism. I apologise to my noble friend as she has to take it all the time, but other departments have been infinitely worse in some of their inappropriate delegations. The Home Office is not the worst offender.

Clauses 7(9) and 8(9)

“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”

to reduce serious violence. Clauses 7 and 8 allow collaboration between authorities and a local government area

“to prevent and reduce serious violence”,

including to

“prepare and implement a strategy for exercising their functions”—

all good stuff.

Under Clauses 7 and 8, a strategy

“may specify an action to be carried out by … an educational authority … a prison authority … or … a youth custody authority”,

and such authorities are under a duty to carry out the specified actions. However, there is no requirement for such a strategy to be published; instead, the Secretary of State has the power, exercisable by regulations subject to the negative procedure, to

“make provision for or in connection with the publication and dissemination of a strategy”.

This power would appear to allow the Secretary of State to provide that a strategy need not be published if she so wished, or even to decide not to make a provision about publication at all. That does not make sense to us. My committee is

“concerned that the absence of a requirement to publish means that a strategy can have legislative effect—by placing educational authorities, prison authorities and youth custody authorities under a statutory duty to do things specified in it—but without appropriate transparency.”

We therefore recommend

“that the delegated powers in clauses 7(9) and 8(9) should be amended”—

that is, tweaked a wee bit—

“to require the publication of any action which is specified in a ‘strategy’ as one that an educational authority, a prison authority or a youth custody authority must carry out.”

That is a minor tweak—actually, so are many of the other things we recommend. We may be scathing in the report, but we are not asking that fundamental bits of the Bill be deleted or rewritten completely; we are merely asking for more transparency. Putting more things on the face of the Bill will save the Government rather a lot of grief in this House later on.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on the amendment, following that of the chairman of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. I commend the committee’s work in general, with more general comments on this Bill and the two amendments to which it has given rise in this particular case.

I am not persuaded of the merits of having a statutory structure for local co-operation strategies. I am strongly in favour of local co-operation; it should be happening everywhere to deal with serious violence and many other problems in the system. Where that is done and works well—as it has done in youth justice, to some extent—it demonstrates its value pretty quickly.

However, this is a statutory scheme; because of that, statutory obligations are created and there must be accountability for them. I am in a charitable mood so I will suggest that, if not exactly careless drafting, this did not anticipate the question, “What if no provision is made for publication of the strategy?” That is what the two amendments deal with. Perhaps the Government are undiminished in their intention that the strategies will be published and will therefore be accountable to the communities in which they are deployed but, as the Bill stands, it is weak on that point and it would be much better to make it clearer.

This is not by any means the worst delegated power issue to arise in the Bill—I am intrigued that the Home Office got off lightly tonight, with the chairman of the DPRRC calling it not the worst department. However, in this particular case, it needs to be made much clearer that, if statutory obligations are created and strategies have the force of statute, they must be published and must be accountable to the communities in which they operate.