Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [HL]

Lord McNally Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 15th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick]

Perhaps I may add one brief point to what was said so powerfully by the noble and learned Lord, which is to remind the House of what was said by your Lordships’ Constitution Committee, of which he and I are members. The committee’s eighth report of this Session, which was on the Bill, stated in paragraph 21:

“We are deeply concerned that the power in clause 16 may be used to create an offence for which a sentence of imprisonment for up to 10 years may be imposed, and that rules on the evidence to demonstrate that the case is proved, and defences to such charges, are subject to ministerial regulation. We consider that such regulation-making powers are constitutionally unacceptable and should not remain part of the Bill”.


The Minister has dealt in Amendment 46 with the second part of that criticism, which is the quite extraordinary suggestion in the original Bill that a Minister, by regulations, should have power to alter defences to charges and to address rules on evidence, such as the burden and standard of proof. This was a quite extraordinary suggestion and I hope that the House will never again see such a provision presented in a Bill by Ministers. However, to his credit the Minister has accepted in Amendment 46 that that provision should be removed. What remains is the suggestion that Ministers should have the power to create offences for which a sentence of imprisonment of up to 10 years is imposed—and on that I entirely agree with what the noble and learned Lord said.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I may intervene here as a non-lawyer because I see our lawyers fluttering into their places, rather like that scene in Hitchcock’s “The Birds”. I would like to make a wider point to the House, which is one I have made over the last 20 years in Parliament. It is that one of the crucial roles of this Chamber is to defend the constitution and, above all, to defend it in terms of the relative powers of the judiciary, the Executive and the legislature.

Just over 10 years ago I was on the Cunningham committee, which looked at conventions between the two Houses. If I left a mark on that committee, it was in the clause that states and retains the right of this House to say no. It is the most important power that this House has. It is a nuclear power and something not to be used very often, but it makes the other place come into dialogue and it makes Governments think again. What worries me about the process now under way is that because of the sheer volume of Brexit legislation that will come our way, with a whole flotilla of Bills, it is quite clear that the members of whatever team is looking at this in the Cabinet Office have said, “We can only do this by using secondary legislation and Henry VIII powers on an unprecedented scale”. If they were successful in doing this we would, in my submission, tilt the balance away from the legislature to the Executive in a way that was not intended—and certainly not intended by those who argued for Brexit as a way of returning power to this Parliament.

This is one of the early tests of it. Funnily enough, the earliest test was in the little-noticed Space Industry Bill where there was a whopping great Henry VIII clause which, after the intervention of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, the Government withdrew. By voting for and carrying this amendment today, right at the start of this process, we will send a message that will make the Government think again—and think more imaginatively and more constitutionally—about how they are going to deal with this legislation without adopting these practices, the dangers of which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, so eloquently explained.

It is a real danger. If we are forced in Bill after Bill to carry amendments, the House of Lords will be accused of exceeding its powers. I do not think that we are exceeding our powers. We are doing what Lord Hailsham referred to almost 40 years ago: trying to avoid the dangers of a democratic dictatorship where the other place simply argues that we must obey. We must not just obey, particularly with clauses such as this which tilt the balance away from the way in which law, and in particular criminal law, is made, in a quite unacceptable way. By voting for this amendment tonight, we will send a message which will avoid a constitutional car crash further down the road.