Motoring Offences Review
Lord Whitty Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Faulks
I am afraid that I do not have an instant answer to the question put by the noble Baroness, but I will look into the matter and write to her about it.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Road Safety Foundation. It is all very well having clearly defined offences and sentences, but all of them have to be enforced. In that context, will the noble Lord dissociate the Government from the populist demand for switching off and removing speed cameras, which have actually contributed substantially to improved driver behaviour and to saving lives?
Lord Faulks
The noble Lord makes an important point, because enforcement is critical; simply having an offence and a penalty is not enough. Of course, these issues are for local authorities with budget restraints, but nevertheless the point is an important one.
Leveson Inquiry
Lord Whitty Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord McNally
My Lords, we are most certainly moving into a new age, but let us be clear: newspapers that publish online are already subject to the same disciplines as the printed versions of those newspapers. As I think we discovered in the Lord McAlpine case, electronic tweeting, e-mails and so on are not protected from the other laws of this land.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, I think we should hear from the noble Lord, Lord Whitty.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, there seems to be one dimension that the discussion in this House so far has missed. A truly free press requires diversity of opinion and therefore diversity of ownership. A whole chunk of the recommendations in the report relate to that plurality point. The Government have a great chance. There is a Bill already before this House, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, in which the recommendations made here on media ownership, competition and plurality could be introduced at this stage. Will the noble Lord and, indeed, the Leader of the House prevail upon their colleagues to consider putting them into the Bill?
Lord McNally
I will certainly take that suggestion back, and I think that the noble Lord is quite right. Although the Leveson report devotes a relatively small amount of attention to plurality, it throws on our respective Houses and on the Government the responsibility of looking at, monitoring and, if necessary, responding to questions of plurality. I hope that we will take up the challenge posed in the report because, as has been said, this is an industry in technical change and we may find that there are very rapid concentrations of power. We may well need to be able to respond to such concentrations, but whether or not that is done through the noble Lord’s suggestions is above my pay grade.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Whitty Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Dubs
My Lords, the Minister promised us a consultation document when we debated this in Committee, and we have to welcome the consultation document even if we cannot resist saying, “Decide first and consult afterwards”. I suppose if the Minister says that the consultation will be on the detail, that is fair enough.
Since we last debated this issue, I have had a chance to talk to people who know a bit about Citizens Advice and trading standards, and there is a lot of concern as to whether trading standards will be able to manage it, partly because of the cuts in resources to local government and partly because of the question of how trading standards people somewhere in a town such as Carlisle manage to deal with a complaint against British Airways or some other large organisation. Are they well enough geared to take on some of the big boys when they are a small trading standards body in a moderately sized town in the north of England? The balance is not the same as it would be between the Competition Commission and British Airways or between the OFT and British Airways.
However, I am most concerned about the central issue. Of course I welcome the merger of the OFT and part of the Competition Commission, although I am worried about the other parts. I wonder how the process will work. Certainly there will be a detailed input into the consultation process from people who know a lot about it, but what chance will Parliament have to look at the results of the consultation? What chance will we have to influence the new body through legislation? I agree entirely with my noble friend Lady Kingsmill when she said it ought to have legislation of its own. After all, these bodies were set up through primary legislation. The issues are large enough and important enough to merit a proper debate, with the chance for us to amend the legislation and use the experience that we have, together with the result of the consultation, to see how we can make it better. As I understand it—I hope I am wrong—the Government will simply consult, although they might publish the results of the consultation, and then the legislation will happen through an order that will be unamendable. I fear that Parliament will not be able to play its part and we shall lose some of the benefits of the process that primary legislation gives us.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, my apologies for my premature intervention earlier. I will not repeat everything that my colleagues have said, but we have a potential dilemma here. People are in broad terms in favour of a merger, subject to certain caveats, but the consultation paper indicates that the total approach to competition policy and consumer policy in which this new merged body would operate has yet to be determined. Many of the options in the paper—changes in the mergers procedures and in the relationship between the new Competition and Markets Authority and the sector economic regulators—would indeed, as my noble friend Lord Dubs implies, normally require primary legislation. Changes in the ability of people to raise super-complaints probably do not require primary legislation but the implication of giving that right to SMEs is that some of this is about monopsony and oligopsony as well as monopoly and oligopoly. That certainly requires some explanation and some primary legislative change.
The reality is that the arrival of this document a few days ago indicates that the Government’s strategy of introducing a new competition institution by the merger of these two bodies can be properly assessed by Parliament only if you have the totality of the change to the competition regime as a whole. It ought to have been a principle of this Bill that bodies whose basis will require primary legislation should not therefore be dealt with solely on the basis of secondary legislation provided for by this Bill. We saw a smaller example of this the other night when the Government withdrew in effect the proposals for the Security Industry Authority, which will require primary legislation to change to where the Government wish to go.
There is a bit of a constitutional issue here that the Government should be aware of. In general, it is a good idea and I do not propose to oppose it, but the Government are in a bit of a dilemma here and in reality we will have to have a competition Act before we can deliver the new body that the Government are envisaging.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, it is important that this is just a preliminary stage to enable this consultation to happen and, if the results of the consultation are sufficiently clear, to go forward with an order that is, as I understand it, amendable—my noble friend will correct me if I am wrong but I think I am right. If one had to do a lot of these exercises through full primary legislation, not only in competition but in all the other areas that this Bill covers, one would have no time in Parliament to do anything else. A review of this kind requires some mechanism of this sort, and we have endeavoured to make the mechanism as close and as secure as we can. It would be a pity to lose this opportunity to do what might be possible in this way, and, so far as I am concerned, putting this into the Bill at this stage is a step in the right direction.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Whitty Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 65 and to speak to the associated amendments. My noble friend Lord Warner just said that he was beginning to feel sorry for the noble Lord, Lord McNally. It may be that my compassion is more easily triggered than his, but my feeling sorry for Ministers started very early on in this Bill—particularly for the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, who has had to sit through the bulk of it.
These amendments are designed to improve the procedure for this Bill, both during the remaining stages of the primary legislation and in how we deal with secondary legislation in what remains of the Bill when it is eventually passed. The first five amendments in this group are essentially paving amendments for Amendments 113 and 119, which are the substantive ones and appear quite late in the Bill. It would have been better had we found a hook to hang them on earlier in the Bill, but Clause 8 deals with the procedure for developing the secondary legislation. In other words, these amendments are designed to help, whether the Front Bench opposite believes that or not. It was unfortunate that from the beginning the Government refused the suggestion of a Select Committee, but the amendments provide an alternative to that in relatively straightforward terms.
As I do not really need to remind the Government or the Committee, we have already seen great chunks of the Bill having to be dropped, partly on substantive grounds and partly on procedural grounds. We have lost forestry and much about the Ministry of Justice quangos which were to be merged or abolished under the Bill. I understand that we are about to lose the whole of Schedule 7 and I think we applaud the Government’s flexibility on that, but they ought never to have got to this stage and the Bill should not have been constructed as it was.
We need a clear and more formal explanation from the Government of why these great lists of quangos are deemed suitable for abolition or merger. I appreciate that before each Committee session we get a list of the quangos that are likely to come up for decision during it, but they do not really suffice. Today, for example, for our enormously important debate on the Youth Justice Board, which excited great interest here in Committee and beyond, we had five lines explaining the reasons for abolishing that board.
My next amendment deals with an organisation for which there are two lines of explanation. Again, I appreciate that the Minister and his colleagues have sent us several other letters to try to explain this more clearly. However, it would be much more sensible if a clear explanation were put before Parliament, rather than one in the form of regulations and incomprehensible cross-references between clauses and existing legislation, of why the Government deem, for example, that the Youth Justice Board or Ofgem, or any of the regulators, should be abolished and the context in which those decisions are being made. There will shortly be a debate about the Equality and Human Rights Commission, for which we have two whole pages of explanation. It is central to a lot of our law and our approach to society, yet we do not have a realistic explanation of why the change is proposed. As a result, the Government have had to concede a lot of the Bill at the first hurdle.
The Government have also conceded that in some other areas they will in any case need primary legislation. Late the other night, and during the previous Session of Parliament, it was conceded that the self-regulating replacement for the Security Industry Authority would need new primary legislation with statutory backing. If that is the case, the point of having this in secondary legislation falls and the point of these lists—and the whole structure of the Bill—begins to fall. The amendments that I propose here would allow us to proceed with the Bill as it is, unsatisfactory though I think most of the Committee by now deems it. It would at least mean that we were assured that when we came to the secondary legislation stage, both Houses would have before them a very clear explanation to debate and vote on before proceeding with the abolition or the merger of any such bodies.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
A requirement under our amendments will be that the explanatory documents are properly reasoned and describe not just what a statutory instrument proposes but the reasoning behind the change. They will also include an impact assessment. The idea is that these should be full documents. I understand what my noble friend is saying and I am grateful for his intervention, because Explanatory Memoranda to Bills frequently explain only what a particular clause might seek to do, not its implications. The requirement is that the explanatory documents should explain the reasoning behind a Minister’s approach to laying a statutory instrument.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s reply. Indeed, at one point he used the word “agreeable”, which perhaps raised my expectations too much. This short debate has demonstrated a need for the Government to provide a clearer explanation of what they are doing in this area. I saw the noble Lord’s Amendment 118 and, like the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, I thought that that related to Explanatory Memoranda of the type that normally relate to content, rather than strategy and context. If the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is saying that the content of the explanatory document will go somewhat wider, I accept that that goes some way towards what I am arguing for.
In relation to the procedural points made by my noble friends Lord Borrie and Lady Hayter, when these amendments were drafted there was another amendment—we have now considered it—in addition to her Amendment 107, which would have strengthened Clause 8 and made more sense of it. I had hoped that that could have been sorted out later, if the Government had stated that in principle they were accepting these amendments. However, Clause 8 as it stands asks the Minister to take these matters into consideration but does not require him to explain them to Parliament in any form. I am concerned that Parliament should, at some stage in the process, hold a substantive debate on the total strategy that lies behind the reason for abolishing or changing the nature of a particular body.
That remains an outstanding issue. When we reach Amendment 118, I hope that the Minister can expand further on how he sees this issue. However, the essential point is that Parliament by this Bill is giving up the right to revert to primary legislative procedure in relation to an organisation that was originally set up after full debate on primary legislation. We need a clear explanation if we are going to cut corners in that way. I still hope that we get there in the secondary, if not in the primary, legislation. If the Minister, before we consider Amendment 118 or at Report, can put a few bones on that, I should be extremely grateful. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.