Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Lords Chamber

That is why Schedule 7 is so dangerous. It is a list of 150 bodies over which any number of Secretaries of State can work themselves up into a lather and behave—if I may say so—probably in an extremely British way but, nevertheless, in a way that exerts pressure on the thinking and behaviour of those bodies. We need a more measured approach and we need the Government to come cleaner than they have about the arguments for and against dealing with the bodies in the way they propose in Schedule 1. I beg to move.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I have not the good fortune to have been in this House for very long. I have had two sessions here. One, in 1999, was rather short, but I have been here from 2004 until today. I do not know a great deal about the procedure of this House, but that sounded extraordinarily like a Second Reading speech. Perhaps I am mistaken, but that is how it sounded to me.

I will briefly offer a little comfort about impact assessments. This is, admittedly, a framework Bill, and there is a long list of bodies in Schedules 1 to 6. Whenever a Secretary of State wishes to put down an order to abolish, to change funding or to merge, he will have to produce an affirmative instrument. Affirmative instruments are subject to 12 weeks’ consultation and the provision of an impact assessment, unless there is a very good reason why there should not be an impact assessment. The idea that there will never be any impact assessments for this House to look at is not right.

How will this House look at them? There is a committee called the Merits Committee, on which I was fortunate enough to serve for four years. That committee, as your Lordships know, looks carefully at every instrument. If it thinks that it is right to draw something to the attention of this House, it does so. If it thinks that the policy in the instrument is inconsistent with the Government’s declared policy, it says so. Then that affirmative instrument is debated.

It has been said—and we shall come back to this—that there should be some enhanced procedure, allowing Parliament to debate the thing in more detail because, it is said, Parliament does not usually turn down affirmative instruments. Nevertheless, we have that power. I believe, if the noble Lord, Lord Warner, will forgive me, that to reiterate that there is no impact assessment is to misunderstand the way in which the Bill has been put together. If you believe that this Bill should not have been put together as it was and that we should do whatever will be done only by primary legislation, what you are saying is that we will do only half a dozen bodies a year, because that is about all we would ever get the parliamentary time for.

[Lord Warner]

The noble Viscount may wish to interpret this as a Second Reading speech, but I thought that I was asking a very serious question about why some of these bodies are in Schedule 1 when they are fundamentally not that much different from the Audit Commission, which is not in Schedule 1. I am trying to understand the Government’s criteria for including some bodies but not others in this Bill. That is the whole purpose of my speech. I say to him, with the greatest respect, that debating the detail of an order some many months after the passing of this Bill will be too late. Those of us who have experience of chairing and being a member of staff of some of these public bodies would say to him that, once you have signed the death warrant—that is what the Bill is—you have no hope of retaining a great deal of talent in some of these bodies. That melts away. It is a perfectly rational, human response to a death warrant being signed on the organisation that you work for. It is a bit late in the day, when we get to the order, to start having the debate about whether it was a good idea in the first place.