Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Whitty Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
Lord Whitty
Amendment 18 relates to the Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides. Essentially, this is a probing amendment, but it raises some rather wider issues. I am very grateful to see the noble Lord, Lord Henley, on the Front Bench. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is quite pleased to see him on the Front Bench as well, because clearly, these matters are in the Defra area but, as I said, raise wider issues. Those wider issues are: why are those two committees being abolished when many other similar committees are not being touched; and in what way will they be abolished?
I must apologise to the Committee, because I was not here earlier today to speak to an amendment in my name, but my noble friend Lady Henig moved it ably. She pointed out that the list in Schedule 1 includes apples and pears—this is not a horticultural question but because they are not like with like. The Government propose that some of those bodies in Schedule 1 be abolished; that some of them revert to Ministers; and that some have their powers and functions moved to other bodies, public and private. It is not clear what will happen to the independent advisory capacity of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances. If they are to be abolished, full stop, that raises a serious issue.
I declare a current interest as a member of the Environment Agency board, which has relations with both those committees, but, more particularly, because I am a former Minister dealing with much of the Minister's current portfolio, and specifically with the Advisory Committee on Pesticides. It was always important to have independent advice. Pesticides have always been a controversial area. If the powers revert to the Minister, the Minister will be seriously—if he will excuse the expression—exposed in this area. It is very important also that advice is independent and is seen to be independent. Of course, the Minister does not have to accept any advisory committee’s advice. When I was in the noble Lord’s position, there were times when I did not accept the advice of the pesticides committee and indeed referred the issue of bystanders and their vulnerability to pesticide exposure to what I felt was the higher authority of the Royal Society. That is a matter for the Minister to decide.
If we abolish these committees and all assessment reverts to the Minister and his civil servants then you lose that independent advice, or do the Government intend to transfer the responsibilities of these committees elsewhere, to other bodies? For example the Environment Agency and the HSE have some responsibilities in this area. Alternatively, the Minister could, I guess, invent a non-statutory body of experts to advise. That has slightly less of an independent air than these two bodies.
I think it would be somewhat dangerous if Ministers decided they were going to go for a more informal arrangement in relation to the whole array of scientific advisory bodies, which exist right across departments and certainly very substantially in Defra. It is dangerous for Ministers as well. The Committtee on Hazardous Substances advises Ministers on dangerous chemicals in air, water and the soil, and on nanomaterials, which have a significant element of controversy, in relation to policy and science and the effect of some of these substances.
Pesticides are also a crucial area because there is a conflict of interests here. There is conflict between the farmers and the agriculturalists and the horticulturalists on one side and local residents and those pursuing other pursuits, and environmentalists and environmental bodies concerned with air and water quality and food standards, food quality and the effect on biodiversity and so forth.
The Minister has to balance the different interests in this area and it is helpful if he has advice which is independent and statutorily-based as one part of his decision-making process. The Minister also has a significant Civil Service element. The pesticides safety division in Defra is a very effective body. However, it looks at systems and monitoring and what is happening in regulations. Of course regulations in this context are quite often European regulations. Some of the most controversial proposals in the pesticides field are in European regulations that are coming on stream. Some elements of the agricultural industry think they will eliminate pesticides in particular specialist areas, so there is quite a delicate political balance in that respect.
It is not just farmers who are affected by this. Quite a lot of pesticides are used in parks and gardens, so there is a big public sector element that has to follow the advice. It would be better if the Minister, when making the regulations, was basing them on the advice of a publicly defensible independent body. All of us who are occasional gardeners are affected by this as well. In some ways the most dangerous area is in people’s own gardens. While the pesticides advisory committee and the PSD will have a whole list of pesticides you are no longer expected to use, I am pretty confident that at least one of my neighbours has a shed load of pesticides that are probably banned by the Geneva Convention, never mind the pesticide regulations. Enforcing it in these areas is quite an important role, so that the public are informed as well as those who have an interest in horticulture and agriculture.
There is a very good and very specific reason why the pesticides advisory committee should remain independent, should remain statutorily-based and should give protection to the Minister and his colleagues. It is also slightly odd that these two committees are the only advisory committees in the Defra family scheduled for abolition. Yet Defra has, I think, 20-odd committees, including the Food Standards Agency and about another dozen of a similar status to these two committees.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I hope I can answer some of the points put by the noble Baroness and her noble friends. I thank her for the point about Defra and the fact that I was going to respond regarding this amendment and a number of others in relation to that department. I appreciate there are quite a number of Defra arm’s-length bodies that are being referred to and I hope I can deal with them in due course as they happen. It may take a day or two before we cover them all but I will try to deal with them as and where appropriate.
The noble Baroness also said that some of these bodies have existed for a very long time indeed. I suppose she was appealing to my nature as a hard-line reactionary Conservative who does not want to see anything change at all. I see the noble Lord nodding in agreement—the arch reactionary here speaks. I am not sure that I am. Things do move on and from time to time we have to change them. For that reason I will not be able to support the noble Baroness in saying that everything should continue as it is just because it always has existed in the past.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, talked about vultures and leopards. I saw one of his noble colleagues, on the edge of the Chamber, who found some of these remarks faintly comic. He should not have done; I did not find them comic because the points were serious. For some reason, when you hear remarks about vultures in this House late at night—well, I think all noble Lords know what I mean. I will certainly take on board the points the noble Lord was making.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, spoke about the Food Standards Agency and asked if we are going to populate these bodies with the wrong people. That is certainly not going to be the case and I hope to deal with that when I deal with the substance of the amendments.
I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for moving these amendments. I appreciate there are four of us who have served in Defra or its former bodies, so we all know what it is like.
The first point I should make is that the bodies are listed in alphabetical order and we are now dealing with the first of the Defra organisations; there will be others later as we work through Schedule 1, as the noble Lord knows. He also knows perfectly well that theirs is not the only advice that Ministers receive—I was grateful that he stressed this—and that when Ministers receive advice from such bodies they are not bound to accept it. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for nodding his head on this point. In the end, Ministers of whatever persuasion have to make a decision. They take advice from all kinds of experts and then make a decision. I believe one of my colleagues, who is not in this House, wrote a book on the subject called Ministers Decide, or something like that, but we all write books of that kind.
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred to the problems that neighbours might have with the some of the things we use in gardens. At that point one thought, “Gosh, what about North Korea?”. However, I take on board what the noble Lord had to say about the problems that different things can cause in different ways.
The amendment seeks to remove the three committees—it relates also to the Northern Ireland committee—from Schedule 1 so that we would not be able to abolish them. I shall set out why we wish to abolish them and explain how we wish their work to continue. I acknowledge that those committees have provided independent, expert and impartial advice to Governments of all political persuasions on hazardous chemicals and pesticides. That advice continues to be of value and I can assure the Committee and all noble Lords that abolition of these three committees in their current form will enable us to put in place better arrangements for the work to continue through expert scientific committees.
This reflects the work that the Cabinet Office has been doing with Sir John Beddington, the government Chief Scientific Adviser and the head of the Government Office for Science, and departments to identify more accountable and effective ways to deliver independent, high-quality scientific advice to government to meet the objectives of the public bodies reform programme and the principles of scientific advice to government.
We also need to recognise that statutory regimes for hazardous chemicals and pesticides are increasingly driven by EU legislation. Those three expert committees will remain independent and be able to put advice direct to Ministers, where appropriate, and will adhere carefully to the government code of practice for scientific and advisory committees.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, asked what savings would be available as a result of this. I wish to make it clear to the noble Lord that we are not looking particularly for savings; the savings, in fact, will be negligible. We are reorganising how the department commissions and applies scientific evidence and looking at ways to do this more coherently and efficiently. These bodies are being reconstituted as expert scientific committees to the department rather than as statutory NDPBs. That will allow them to provide better advice to us in an equally independent way without any particular savings. I hope the noble Lord will accept that.
With that explanation, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment at this stage. Failing that, we will have to look at it again at a later stage.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for explaining some of the background to this. It was intended as a probing amendment and I think that we have probed something out of it. The Minister said in the latter part of his remarks that this was part of a discussion of the best way to deliver scientific advice, in conjunction with the Cabinet Office and the Chief Secretary. My query arose not so much because I want everything to be set in aspic and that no change should take place, but because there should be a rationale for it. After the Minister’s remarks I still do not quite understand why these two committees, both of which are particularly sensitive in a political and media way, do not deserve a clearly statutorily-based form of advice, whereas a significant number of the rest of Defra’s advisory committees are not on this list, and, if you took it across Whitehall, obviously the picture is wider.
This is why I argued that, in order to have this debate on a rational basis, we need some background from the Minister, or the Minister for Science or from BIS saying what our overall approach to advisory committees is. If it is, in general, that we move away from statutorily-based committees to expert panels, there may be an argument for that. The problem is that we have not heard that argument and that this seems to be differentially applied to bodies within the same department, let alone across Whitehall as a whole. There is a much bigger issue behind this that, at some point, the House is going to have to look at before we can easily give our consent to including some of these bodies on one or other of the schedules to the Bill.
I am glad that the Minister has, in a sense, opened that up, because maybe there is a bigger background that we will come back to at a later stage of the Bill. I am certainly not utterly convinced that the expert panel is much different from a statutory body in terms of the quality of its advice or procedures and, clearly, there is no great cost advantage. I still think that Ministers have, themselves, the protection that, if there is a statutory body giving them advice, at least that part of their advice is clear. Where there are other aspects to it and they take a different decision, that is a separate matter.
Clearly, I have opened up something here and I am glad that I have. For tonight, I will withdraw the amendment, but I think that we will probably be returning to this, or a wider debate.
Queen's Speech
Lord Whitty Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
My Lords, this is a wide-ranging debate and I intend to say a few sentences about every area of it. First, I warmly welcome the noble Baroness to her position on the Front Bench. I am very gratified to see her there. Not only has she done the hard slog of opposition, but—I declare my interest as chair for at least a few more weeks of Consumer Focus—she was a distinguished consumer champion at the National Consumer Council. I am not entirely disinterested in saying this because I hope that she will ensure that her department, BIS, which has not always been that conscious of consumer issues, albeit that those issues are central to its remit, does not ignore the consumer dimension or the employee dimension. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Henley, whose remit in Defra coincided with a little part of mine and that of the Lord Speaker before me. I think that the advice that we would give him is that nothing is quite as complicated as people tend to tell you that it is. I will leave it at that.
On the BIS part of the agenda, we have had references to financial regulation. Now that my noble friend Lord Myners is no longer influential in this area, I fear that we are not clear in which direction we are going. The banking industry and, above all, those who depend on banking services need to know what the future system of regulation will be. Will we abolish the FSA? Will we give a bigger role to the Bank of England? A commission is being set up to decide those things, but people want certainty. Above all, I hope that these issues are decided not on the basis of relatively arcane arguments about Glass-Steagall or whatever, but on the basis that we get a better service to business and to individuals from the banking system. We want more competition and more diversity, but not at the expense of less service and less choice to consumers.
There is a whole bit on regulation in the coalition agreement, in the manifestos and in earlier papers, particularly from the Conservative Party. Despite the fact that some of what the Government are arguing is sensible, the first thing that is picked out—the one-in, one-out process—is completely bonkers. The previous Government had a go at it. It cannot be worked in that way. There are other things in the programme on which the Government should focus. Looking at whole groups of regulation and the operation of a sunset clause for regulators would be much more effective than trying to have a first-in, first-out process. That is a bit of advice to those who believe in better regulation rather than less regulation.
On the Post Office, I was a bit surprised to see almost exactly the proposition of my noble friend Lord Mandelson, of which I was not entirely in favour, back on the agenda. I am not clear whether we are looking for capital for the Post Office or for a new organisation—presumably one of its competitors—to take over its management. Either way, we need certainty within the organisation. The employees need it, but above all customers, businesses and individuals need to know which way the Post Office is going. I am not at all convinced that the Bill that seems to be envisaged will do that.
On the environment and energy agenda, I have just two or three points to make. We need to pursue all aspects of the low-carbon agenda and, behind that, we need to reconvince the public that the fight against climate change is indeed one of the priorities of this Government and of society as a whole. There have been some rather unfortunate beginnings, but I hope that the Government can recover from them. The cut in help to business in terms of low-carbon investment is not a particularly helpful signal, nor is the dropping of part of the heat initiative. I am less confident than the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, that dropping the Infrastructure Planning Commission will mean that nuclear power can play its proper part. I hope, therefore, that the concentrations on energy policy will be to provide not only for greener energy but also for a fairer cost of energy to consumers, whether they be businesses or individuals.
I welcome, I think, the commitment to the green deal, which will enable householders effectively to take out loans to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. However, that does not address seriously the position on fuel poverty to which my noble friend Lord O’Neill just referred. It will help a lot of middle-income groups and improve energy use among household consumers, but it will not tackle the problem of fuel poverty. We need a clear indication from the Government of where they intend to go on that front.
I am running out of time, so I will not go into detail on agriculture, which the noble Lord, Lord Henley, will no doubt be relieved to hear. On transport, the one thing that I want to do is to compliment the coalition on its decision not to go ahead with the third runway at Heathrow. That was a brave and important decision and I hope that the Government can follow through on the environmental agenda and on other decisions about the environment.
I was not going to mention this, but I shall, as the noble Lord, Lord Monson, who is no longer in his place, raised it. There is one apparently bad decision on the part of the Government. I do not believe that it is helpful to society or in the interests of rural areas to repeal the Hunting Act. I had some most unpleasant times in this House when I promoted the Bill. Straight repeal, which the Government seem inclined to allow via a Private Member’s Bill, is not a licensing system, is not a middle way and does not allow for local discretion; it is a straight repeal. That would be a regressive step by the Government and I hope that they do not give priority to it.