Deregulation Bill

Debate between Lord Sharkey and Baroness Andrews

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharkey (LD)]

My Lords, I note briefly that Amendments 67 and 72 are essentially technical and consequential.

With one significant difference, Amendment 41 is a repeat of an amendment discussed at some length in Committee. It deals with Clause 87 and Schedule 21, which bring about the wholesale repeal of a huge and hugely varied set of items of legislation, asserting that this legislation is no longer of any practical use. The Government have produced no evidence that these pieces of legislation are in fact no longer of practical use; they simply make that assertion.

There are 84 pieces of primary legislation to be repealed, including seven whole Acts. There are also eight pieces of secondary legislation, making 92 repeals in all. These numbers will rise in a moment when the Minister moves Amendment 42. At this very late stage in the Bill, government Amendment 42 repeals three more pieces of secondary legislation. It is clear that these new repeals will not be subjected to proper parliamentary scrutiny. Like all the other 92 items in Schedule 21, they were not, and will not be, discussed substantively either here or in the Commons, and that is the heart of the matter.

We have before us a proposal to repeal a very large number of items of legislation without any real parliamentary scrutiny and without access to the Government’s evidence that these items really are no longer of practical use. This seemed to the Joint Committee on the draft Bill, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and of which I was a member, to be unsatisfactory. In fact, the Joint Committee recommended that the items in what is now Schedule 21 be referred to the law commissions for independent confirmation that they were in fact genuinely no longer of practical use. We did that because we felt that:

“The skills, research and consultation needed to ensure that Parliament, external organisations and the public can be satisfied that a piece of legislation is genuinely obsolete strongly suggest that the Law Commissions are better placed to conduct that work than Government departments. Added to which, the independence of the Law Commissions from Government and their track record since 1965 reinforce the trust that Parliament places in the … Law Commission Bills”,

including statute law repeal Bills.

Amendment 41 proposes exactly what the Joint Committee recommended. It refers all the items in Schedule 21 to the law commissions for a safety check before they can be repealed. The Government disagreed with this proposal in Committee. To their credit, at no point have the Government attempted to argue that it is clear, on inspection, that all the legislation proposed for repeal is no longer of practical use; instead, they advance three main arguments.

Their first argument was that Schedule 21, in its original form, had gone through pre-legislative scrutiny. This is the case only if simply being in a draft Bill counts as scrutiny. The Joint Committee was required to work to a quite unnecessarily tight timetable. We did not have time to discuss the items in the schedule and nor did the Commons. The Government’s second argument was that many of the provisions in Schedule 21 came out of the Red Tape Challenge. It is not clear why this is an argument against referral to the law commissions. Leaving aside any scepticism about the rigour of the Red Tape Challenge, the truth is as the Minister acknowledged in Committee. The items chosen for repeal via the Red Tape Challenge had a political origin. This illustrates the point made by the Joint Committee.

Scrutiny by the law commissions has the advantage of being, and of being seen to be, absolutely independent. There can be no suggestion of political interest in any of the judgments about what is safe to repeal and what is not. The Government also argued that,

“government departments are key consultees for the Law Commission in seeking to make these kinds of repeals”.—[Official Report, 18/11/14; col. GC 146.]

So they should be. Again, this is not in itself an argument against referral to the law commissions. It simply emphasises the rigorous, wide-ranging and transparent analysis and consultation that the law commissions employ in assessing the case for repeal.

The Government made one other comment about the version of this amendment that we discussed in Committee. They rightly pointed out that it did not impose a duty on the law commissions to do anything with a referral to them and that it imposed no timescale for action. This amendment rectifies these defects. It says that if the law commissions have not reported on the items referred to them 12 months after referral, the repeals may go ahead anyway.

None of the Government’s arguments against this amendment in Committee seemed at all compelling. I do not for a moment doubt that the 95 items for repeal have been examined by the departments concerned. I do not doubt that in some cases there will have been consultation, but we do not know the depth or the rigour of these examinations and we do not know the arguments put forward in consultation. Critically, we do not know how these arguments were weighted by Ministers.

In Committee, I asked the Minister whether we could see any written reports on these proposed candidates for repeal before Report stage. I did not get that but I did get a detailed description of how departments assessed candidates for repeal and identification of some items that have been consulted on. I also got a detailed list of why the Government believe each item in Schedule 21 is safe to repeal. I did not get evidence, just summary reasons. That must have taken a considerable amount of work and I am very grateful to the Minister and his officials for that.

However, the problem with this information is that it is narrative. It is useful narrative and a useful summary but it is not evidence and cannot be properly interrogated. It also does not settle the worries about consultation. We still do not know how many consultations took place and with whom. We do not know the quality of these consultations, which is an issue of wider concern than just this Bill. Only a few days ago, your Lordships’ Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee published a report called Inquiry into Government Consultation Practice. The report looks at secondary legislation and some of its conclusions seem to have a more general context. In particular, the report notes that,

“a number of our concerns about the Government's approach to consultation are not allayed: and we are most troubled by an apparent absence within Government, in the Cabinet Office and in individual Departments, of a commitment to monitor consultation practice and to draw lessons of general application”.

There are reasons to worry about government consultations especially when we have no access to them.

The issue here is essentially one of principle. When it comes to wholesale repeals, who can we best trust to tell us that legislation is really no longer of any practical use? Is it the Government, via not only wholly transparent internal processes and a ministerial decision? Or should it be the independent law commissions set up by Parliament to do precisely this and which have a statutory duty to apply the three tests of external expertise, impartiality and independence? The Joint Committee thought it should be the law commissions.

We asked the law commissions how long they would take to certify whether or not the items in Schedule 21 were safe from repeal. They told us it would take between four and 12 months. The Government say that they are confident that it is safe to repeal the items in Schedule 21; they are confident that they are in fact of no practical use. So what exactly is the risk? What is the problem with a four to 12 month delay? What is lost by referral to the law commissions? Nothing is lost, but a considerable amount is gained. What is gained is trust, independent transparent scrutiny, and giving Parliament the confidence that repeal is safe via the mechanism that Parliament set up for that very purpose. Amendment 41 does what the Joint Committee recommended. I beg to move.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, as a Member of the Joint Committee I support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and commend him for the indefatigable way he has brought this issue back on Report. I can confirm that the Joint Committee was exercised about this failure, this deliberate resistance, by the Government to consider the Law Commission for all the reasons the noble Lord set out—transparency, reduction of risk and uncertainty and the opportunity to consider the repeals which were being recommended.

Let me take the House back to the first stages of this Bill, when there was something in the spirit of the original clause which was dropped from the eventual Bill, whereby the Minister was going to take upon himself the power to decide which legislation was or was not redundant and to recommend that a whole swathe of legislation should actually disappear from the statute book. Such was the reaction to that that the clause was wisely dropped.

As to the attitude towards the Law Commission, I do not quite understand the difficulty. As the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, said, the Law Commission was absolutely clear that it would be able to deal with and expedite the passage of judgment on the repeals and it would give everyone the security of knowing that whatever was moved for repeal would have that additional scrutiny. That is not to cast aspersions on the ability of departments to make a judgment about what is or is not redundant legislation, but as we have got the Law Commission and that is part of its job, we should take advantage of that expertise and the scope to do that. On that basis, I certainly support the amendment.