Armed Forces (Tri-Service Serious Crime Unit) (Consequential Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2022

Debate between Lord Hope of Craighead and Lord Tunnicliffe

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I intervene out of order, encouraged by what the noble Baroness just said. One point that attracted my attention is that the regulations apply to all parts of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,

“and the British overseas territories (except Gibraltar).”

Is there something particular about Gibraltar that means they do not apply there? It would be interesting to know why Gibraltar should be excluded. I am sure it is not an oversight, but the Explanatory Memorandum does not explain and it would be interesting to know the reason.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this narrow and consequential SI, which of course we totally support. It gives us an opportunity to have hopefully a final look at this gaggle of legislation that has been necessary to introduce these reforms.

I worry about whether there will be problems deciding what a serious crime is. One can see how it might become defined within a single service, and I am totally in favour of the tri-service unit, but this will involve single-service police forces designating a crime as important for the tri-service specialists. What criteria will be used to decide that it should go to the tri-service specialists? Who will make that decision? To what extent do the criteria differ from those presently used by the single-service specialist units? On personnel, how will the tri-service unit ensure it has the specialist technical capability to investigate serious crimes?

In the Minister’s introduction she touched on civilian involvement. Can she repeat that, for clarity? Does this mean that people recruited from civilian police forces or other specialists will have operational capability? In other words, will they be able to serve alongside military operational police? In those circumstances, will they still be civilian in character?

Having asked those questions, I repeat our total support for the reforms, in respect of which this is one of the last consequential amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

I congratulate the Minister on being so very well prepared.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

Before the Minister sits down—she probably deserves a round of applause for that last answer—can I press my two points a little further? First, I have this vision of the military equivalent of Constable Plod coming across a crime. Somewhere there must be a process where that crime goes up the chain of command and gets to somebody who says, “This is a serious crime and it has to go to the specialist unit”. Who would that be? The Minister can write to me if it is too difficult to answer now. Secondly, on the use of civilians, will they have operational powers? In other words, when they are working with the military will they have the power of arrest?

Consumer Scotland Act 2020 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2022

Debate between Lord Hope of Craighead and Lord Tunnicliffe

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his explanation of the background to this instrument. Of course, it is set out very clearly in the Explanatory Memorandum, which I have read.

I have just one comment, which is on the change of name. The name Citizens Advice Scotland is very well known to people who live in Scotland, and the crucial word in the name is of course “advice”. As an ordinary consumer in Scotland in need of advice, the body to go to would be Citizens Advice Scotland. The new name going into the legislation is Consumer Scotland, which does not include the word “advice”, which begs the question of whether this new body continues to have the function of providing advice. As I understand what the Minister said, and what is set out in the Explanatory Memorandum, the answer is yes; there is no change in function, but there is a change in name.

I was not quite sure whether I picked up the Minister correctly as to whether Citizens Advice Scotland will exist as a body beneath the umbrella of Consumer Scotland, or whether its name will go altogether. If its name goes altogether, there is a question as to the extent to which Consumer Scotland will advertise and make it known to everybody in Scotland that it has an advisory function as well as an advocacy function. For the ordinary person in the street, that is possibly more important than the advocacy—which is important, of course, but not everybody in the street is thinking of it. People seeking advice want to know where to go.

Can the Minister reassure us that the advice function will not only continue to be performed but the people in Scotland will be aware that Consumer Scotland is the body to which to go?

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a bit of a maiden speech, in that I must have done at least 100 SIs over the past years, especially in that wonderful rush towards leaving the EU, but I have managed to avoid Scottish SIs until today. As a result, I found reading the SI and the Explanatory Memorandum something of a challenge. Everything I now say may be rubbish, because I might have got it wrong, but I do not really think that we are here to discuss the merits of Consumer Scotland.

It seems to me that the Scottish Government created Consumer Scotland, and as far as I can see that is their business, and they have to be accountable to their electorate over whether it is a good or a bad thing. To do its full job, as I understand it, it needs to take over responsibility of Citizens Advice Scotland with respect to energy, postal services and water, because they are not devolved areas, and therefore it is our responsibility to agree that these non-devolved areas shall be given to Consumer Scotland. As I said, to do this, it needs our authority, because those areas are not devolved. This oversight activity seems to have worked in the past with Citizens Advice Scotland, and I have no reason to believe that it will not work as well with Consumer Scotland. Our only interest should be whether those transfers will bring harm to those services in the rest of the UK—and, frankly, I do not see how it can possibly produce any harm.

As far as I can see, the other parts of the SI seem to be technical in nature, and we have no interest in whether Consumer Scotland is a good or a bad thing. That is the responsibility of the Scottish Government. I therefore fully support the draft instrument.

Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2020 and Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014 (Consequential Modifications) Order 2022

Debate between Lord Hope of Craighead and Lord Tunnicliffe

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this order for a particular reason, if I can give a little bit of history. As the noble Viscount will be aware, I sat as a Lord of Appeal in the days when the House of Lords was the final Court of Appeal. In one case, which is very firmly in my memory, a couple appeared before us who were unable to marry. As far as one could tell they looked a perfectly normal, very respectable and charming man and woman, but the problem was that the man had been born as a woman. In those days, we did not have all the language to express that, as we have nowadays. It was a sex change problem. The problem was that the Marriage Act made it absolutely clear that whether one was a man or woman for the purposes of marriage was dependent on the sex at birth. We were unable to give them the authority to marry, but we drew the Government’s attention to the fact that there was a human rights element to this—a right to family life and so on—that they were being denied by the wording of the Marriage Act.

I must say that the Government acted commendably well in response to what we said. It led to the Government bringing in the civil partnership legislation, which was to deal with the problem of people of the same sex at birth wanting to marry. Certainly, as Law Lords, at the time we never contemplated that marriage would have to be replaced by a civil partnership between opposite sexes, but the Government have moved on, and there is obviously public demand for this now—people want to use civil partnerships rather than go through a formal marriage. I understand that. It makes obvious sense to do what the measure does to make up the position so that there is an equality of treatment through all the legislation.

There is one common law right that I do not think this measure deals with, but there is a way round it. If one dies intestate there is a legal right that children have, called legitim. At the moment, children of civil partnerships do not have that right because in common law it is available only to children of particular individuals who marry. Civil partnerships are not recognised in the way the legislation is designed for common law, because it is for children of a regular marriage.

There is not a problem, because those who wish to take advantage of legal rights can cure the problem by the adoption process, because adoption has allowed for it, but I wonder whether the noble Viscount and his advisers might take away consideration as to how to deal with legitim. At the moment, as I understand it, you have to go through the adoption process to give the children of a civil partnership the right to legitim. I might be wrong about this. As it happens, I have been looking at a soon to be published textbook on this subject that indicates that children of a civil partnership do not have the right to legitim, which one would want them to have. Because it is common law it is not embraced in the legislation, but it might be helpful if something was done about that to address what is quite a real problem. This is a right that attaches to every estate; it is a legal right given by common law. You cannot disinherit children in Scotland, because they have a right to a part of the estate. We would want to be sure that that survived into a civil partnership.

The only other point I want to ask the Minister about is whether there is any statistical information on how widely this provision is being used for its original purpose, between same-sex couples, and/or now between couples of opposite sexes. I rather think it has overtaken the same-sex situation. Although that solution is available—it is the one solution that same-sex couples have—it has rather overtaken it. But that would be quite interesting, if there are statistics readily to hand; if there are not, do not bother about it—but it would be interesting to know how widely it has been taken up between those two branches of couples.

That all having been said, I very much welcome this legislation. It makes obvious good sense and, as far as I can see, has done all the right things where statutory law is concerned, leaving aside the common-law problem to which I have drawn attention.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am struggling in a sense with this Scottish stuff. I suppose it shows that I do not really understand the devolution settlement. My simple idea is that the settlement says, “Scotland can do what Scotland wants to do, except where powers are reserved to the United Kingdom as a whole”. It seems that what we have in this order means that, to achieve that, reserved law sometimes interferes at the edges. If one is respecting the devolution settlement, one should accede to the requests of the Scottish Government to change this stuff around the edge to meet what Scotland wants to do. Once again, I do not think it is really our business whether what Scotland wants to do is a good or bad idea.

I was not helped on this order because I did not have the training, mind or history of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. I always enjoy him presenting his ideas on these occasions. Unfortunately, I did not really grasp the SI. I read it—no, let us be realistic. I read the Explanatory Memorandum several times, but I just could not keep up with the interrelationships.

Another thing I am sensitive about in the Scotland situation is that to blunder into such sensitive areas and make any comments on the substance of what the instrument is trying to achieve is probably unwise because one could, at the end of the day, create offence. Accordingly, I shall refrain from commenting on the substance. I have only one question: the Explanatory Memorandum says at its beginning that it is created by the Scotland Office, but it reads as if it is a consensus document between the Scotland Office and the Scottish Government. Who fundamentally created this statutory instrument? That is: whose ideas were they, and it is in fact a consensus document between the Scottish and UK Governments? If it is, I can see no way in which the SI adversely affects the UK-wide legislation, which I believe is the limit of our concerns. Accordingly, we support this statutory instrument.