Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I wish I could support my noble friend but I am afraid I cannot. She shows a total misunderstanding of the way in which bureaucratic minds work: if you extend a deadline, they do nothing until they are approaching it. All that happens is that you prolong the whole thing. Let us face it, we would not be considering the whole business of how many laws we should be retaining or binning if there had not been a sunset clause in the original drafting of the Bill. That concentrated minds in Whitehall and got them to start finding out how much legislation they have. I think some of them were quite surprised how much there was. I certainly cannot support this amendment.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

I welcome that 500 of the regulations will be dealt with on Wednesday with a view to them being revoked, but what worries me is that there must be at least another 3,000. What will happen to them? At what point, if ever, will this House have an opportunity to comment on them?

Procedure and Privileges Committee

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Baroness Butler-Sloss

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

I stand corrected by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. Clearly, we are not talking about powers being given to the Lord Speaker but, as she says, about duties. As you impose more duties on the Lord Speaker, obviously the role that he or she plays in the House gets greater than it was before.

I turn now to my noble friend Lord Cormack’s amendment, which basically wants us to go back to the status quo. Here, I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. We have to ask ourselves: in having these pass readers, what are we actually achieving? I will try to help my noble friend the Senior Deputy Speaker by suggesting that perhaps this is to save money. If it is, perhaps he can tell us how much money he thinks he is going to save by doing this, because then we could get the whole thing into perspective. Otherwise, there does not seem to me to be any seriously pressing argument as to why we should change rather than go back to the original system that we had before this pandemic started, which seemed to have worked extremely efficiently. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that the onus is on the Senior Deputy Speaker to say why we should change, when it seemed to work so very efficiently before we ever started all this.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I would just like to say that my noble friend Lady Hayman is speaking such excellent sense that the House should uniformly agree with her.