Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Warner

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in the sense that my wife is a trustee of a major public orchestra. It does not receive public money, but I just make the point: if you do not receive public money, are you one of these public bodies? If you do, do you become one, and does that mean that you make a choice, which is quite a serious choice?

I also declare an interest because in my business we advise people on procurement and sustainability of procurement. I say to my noble friend that procurement is a very difficult issue on which to advise, because it is very widespread. What does it mean? It means almost everything from what might be called lavatory rolls at one end to procuring very large numbers of services or products. It can also cover the issue of the orchestra that procures another orchestra from abroad. As the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, said, it might have intended to bring an orchestra from, let us say, Russia to this country; if it then decides not to do so, is that the kind of decision that comes under the Bill?

I also have a concern, as the noble Baroness put forward, that the Secretary of State has an ability to remove from the exceptions things that for most of us are really important. If we are not to be allowed to procure on the basis of sustainability or climate change—things that really are existential issues—we have a serious problem, because on any definition of public bodies, the very bodies we are talking about are the ones that ought to be procuring and investing on those bases. The idea that this is only temporary, that it is in the Bill but can be removed by the arbitrary decision of the Secretary of State—and it could be arbitrary, because there is nothing in the Bill to say it is other than arbitrary—worries me considerably.

I rose not just to say that to my noble friend. I am afraid that the Government have a record of producing Bills that do not appear to have been carefully thought through. If the Bill had been produced to me as Secretary of State for the Environment, I would have sent it back and said, “There are too many questions in this, and I don’t want to have to present it to either House of Parliament because I can’t answer a number of the questions”. I do not blame my noble friend for not being able to answer some of these questions, but they are pretty fundamental, are they not? I just wonder what the Secretary of State responsible for the Bill said when it was brought in front of him. Did he ask what the definition of public body is or what a public function is? If he asked those questions, did he get answers? If he got answers, were they satisfactory, and why do we not have those answers when the questions are asked on the Floor of the House?

My worry is this. Out there large numbers of bodies, some of them very small, are worried that this will affect them. I do not believe that kind of legislation does us any good at all. Precision is absolutely crucial here, and we need to restrict this to a very clear, relatively small number of bodies and have a very clear understanding as to what it means.

If we take sporting bodies receiving government money—I cannot claim to be a sportsman and I declare no interests whatever on this front—it seems to me that if individual sportsmen wish to boycott something, the sporting body probably has to discuss that. If a body discusses that, it seems to me that under this Bill it can easily get itself into a position in which that is improper, if not illegal. Again, I do not see why people should have to ask themselves this question.

We are, at the moment, seeing a very inelegant discussion about individuals’ decisions on tax matters, pretty unfairly in most cases I have heard. It is difficult to understand quite a lot of the detailed tax legislation, but producing this legislation will ask a whole lot of other people to understand very detailed and extremely difficult concepts. I say to my noble friend that all I want is to feel that I could vote for something that I understand, and that other people can understand, which does not reach beyond the necessary areas and actually achieves some good. Those are three perfectly reasonable requests, but I am not sure that the Bill meets any of them so far.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, we are dealing with a Bill that is in highly controversial territory. If we have sloppy definitions in the Bill, it will encourage litigation. It would be a strange thing if we passed a Bill with a lot of problems around definitions that causes, over time, more people to raise issues around sources of investment through the courts. With all due respect to the Government of Israel, from time to time they have shown quite an enthusiasm for using litigation to make their points.

Also, picking up from the last group of amendments, we live in a rather different time in terms of who raises money for public services, particularly capital money for investments. If we take health and care, the areas I know something about, there is a lot more interest in the idea of going into the private sector—private equity and PFI being good examples—to try to raise money to build facilities of some kind or another for which the public sector has found it difficult to find the money. People who raise funding and use it to provide public services perform a kind of public function. If we have a sloppy Bill, they leave themselves exposed to probing of where their sources of money come from. You then run the risk of driving these people away from the kind of investments in public service that we may need to get some of our old capital structures improved over time. I suggest to the Committee that if we do not tighten up these definitions, we run a series of risks that are self-defeating to any Government.