Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Debate between Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

To confirm, I think that is what I said a couple of minutes ago. The sole reason must be that it is financially risky—that it is business risk guidance, not boycotts. My own feeling is that that is a helpful clarification. I am sure that noble Lords will look in Hansard at what I have already said.

If I might now finish, I would very much like to—

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

Before the Minister sits down, which she has indicated she is very anxious to do, I would like to go back to the, in my view, very unfortunate discussion that we have had about the definition suggested in Amendment 27.

As I understand it, it is accepted that financial risk is included within the wording. What is unclear—no doubt in years to come people will pore over the Minister’s speech, so I want another little bit for them to pore over—is: what about financial impact? I think the Minister said that that gave rise to uncertainty, but it would be helpful to know whether, in looking at the way in which decisions can be made, the financial impact can be taken into account. It would be so much better, of course, if we put the words in the Bill and left it not to accountants but to lawyers to deal with in the future.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I can reassure the noble and learned Lord that lawyers have been involved in drafting the Bill, as he can probably imagine. I tried to set out quite clearly at the beginning why we felt that the wording we got was right; that included financial impact. I have subsequently clarified the point about motivation and financial risk.

In the excitement, I have lost my place. I was asked about the effect of removing Clause 12, and was hoping to be able to answer the noble Lord. Removing the clause would mean that the ban would not apply to the fund investment decisions of administering authorities of LGPS. The administering authorities are local authorities, which are clearly a core part of the state and are therefore public authorities for the purposes of Section 6 of the Human Rights Act. That is why they are the only pension funds captured by the Bill. We have seen clear examples of local authorities attempting to engage in BDS activity in the past. It would not be appropriate to apply the ban to funds administered by private entities, such as the Universities Superannuation Scheme.

As I have argued before, council tax payers should be able to expect their local councils to exert time and effort on solving local issues, rather than spending time thinking about boycotts of foreign states when, as the noble Lord has said, the beneficiaries expect the responsible authorities to concentrate on returns and the ongoing viability of their investments in the interests of the beneficiaries. If the Bill were to stand without Clause 12, councils coming under pressure to develop their own policies on divisive international issues would be pushed towards an LGPS loophole to implement BDS campaigns.

The priority for these funds should be to provide stability and good long-term returns for the hard-working local government officials who are their members. We now know that this includes the noble Lord, Lord Warner, the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, and others. The Bill helps the administering authorities not to be distracted from this important purpose, and to focus on returns in a responsible, long-term way. For these reasons, I ask noble Lords not to press their amendments and not to oppose the question that Clause 12 stand part of the Bill.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Departments have been looking at these regulations for a number of years. Some time ago, when I was previously a Minister, I was looking at the regulations to see how they might be changed post Brexit. I have tried to explain that we have 3,700 regulations. They have been gone through and most of the regulations are there, but we are also looking with the National Archives to see if there are others. If they are known only to the National Archives, the chances of them being really important is—to express a personal view—probably quite small, but of course I could be proved wrong.

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

On a technical, legal point, it would be helpful if the Government could set out the methodology that they have used to ensure that everything—whether it be by directive, by tertiary legislation or by any other way—has been identified. A detailed analysis of the methodology would be extremely helpful because we need to know how it has been done to know what level of assurance we can have in it. I have tried it myself and found it quite difficult. I would like to know what has been done. It obviously cannot be done now, but a detailed methodology would be very helpful.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

As always, the noble and learned Lord is very helpful. I will think about that and about what we can say about the methodology that has been adopted. It is helpful that he mentioned that it was not the easiest thing for him to find this. That is confirmatory.