Subsidy Control Bill

Baroness Altmann Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 9th February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of this modest amendment. As the noble Baroness said, the issue has been raised before, and one month is a totally unrealistic timescale. To my mind, it indicates a clear governmental preference to reduce scrutiny of decisions on subsidies that are made in general.

It is especially an issue because this also involves agricultural subsidies and agriculture is, in large part, based on small businesses. I shall give you a picture: farmers in Wales are not commonly monitoring the decisions taken by local authorities in, for instance, eastern England, which might cause them to feel aggrieved. It might take them some time to get up to speed on the implications of those decisions. It might surprise some people, sitting in the centre of London, to know that wi-fi in the centre of Wales is not wonderful. Many communities still rely on the postal service and weekly newsletters, for example from the farming unions. There can be lots of reasons why information that would worry small businesses affected by a subsidy decision would take some time to filter through.

In general, I can think of a host of reasons why one might miss this deadline—for example, summer or Christmas holidays provide an interruption of several weeks to ordinary business. I join the noble Viscount in his point that it could simply be counterproductive. People may think that, if in doubt, they should lob in an appeal to the tribunal because, in reality, they would not be able to find all the information required in the timescale this Bill provides. On a previous group of amendments, the Minister referred to the pre-action information request process. I believe that process will find itself exceptionally heavily used, if the Government do not see that this timescale is far too tight to be practical.

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

I rise briefly to add my support to the concerns expressed by other noble Lords that a one-month timeframe, especially for smaller companies, is not only challenging but potentially unachievable and could cause significant detriment to our promising smaller companies. They may be harmed by a subsidy, possibly unintentionally, and this could deny them the opportunity to appeal against that which could be harmful to their business. I urge my noble friend to consider the reasonableness of this amendment. If he is not able to accept it now, could he explain to the Committee how, in practice, this one-month timeframe is reasonable and could reasonably be met by those potentially affected?

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I intervene briefly to strongly support my noble friend’s amendment and other noble Lords’ comments. One solution that the Minister might be tempted to suggest is to allow them to get it in within a month but add more documentation later. That would be easy.

I refer the Committee to the proposed new rule 98A(7) of the Competition Appeal Tribunal Rules:

“The Tribunal may not extend the time limits provided for in this rule unless it is satisfied that the circumstances are exceptional.”


Probably none of the things that noble Lords mentioned would be classed as exceptional, which confirms that one month is hopelessly short. I very much support three months or even longer, if anyone has a better idea.