Subsidy Control Bill

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 9th February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

I am going to be very brief about this. The point emerged in the earlier remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, and deals with the question of standing. I want to deal only with the technical point. It is obvious that where the Minister, qua his responsibility as the Minister for England, grants a subsidy, the position of the devolved Government should be exactly the same as if the Minister in England were able to challenge a decision of the devolved Government. There should be parity. We have talked a lot about equity, which I shall return to, but it seems that there is no equity.

The short point of this amendment is to try to ensure there is no dispute about standing. Standing sometimes causes very serious difficulties. If, however, the Welsh or Scottish Government felt that the action of the Secretary of State or some authority in England was disadvantaging people or a particular enterprise in Wales or Scotland, they should surely have the standing to bring that to the CAT. If, for the reasons I have already adumbrated, private enforcement is not successful—and the Minister has said nothing to persuade me that it will be—this is even more reason to have more custodians of the public interest looking to ensure that our noble and other Ministers in London actually stick to the principles of the Bill. I beg to move.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I will be equally brief. The omission of Ministers of the devolved Governments at this stage of the Bill is stark and astonishing. It immediately begs the question why, because the devolved Governments are specifically mentioned elsewhere in the Bill, although they are not given equality of treatment. Here, they are simply omitted. As indicated by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, we need clarity here.

We particularly need clarity because there is equality of treatment on issues such as common frameworks. There could well be a conflict between what has been agreed by the UK Government in that context and what is in the Bill. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 79, which neatly follows the questions of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, about standing.

On 13 January, the following fanfare was announced from Downing Street:

“Prime Minister to chair new council with devolved governments”.

The No. 10 press release described this as a

“Landmark agreement on how UK government and devolved governments will continue to work together”,

and how an agreement on this “has been reached”. It promised “new ways of working”, “Reaffirmed principles” of

“mutual respect, maintaining trust and positive working”

and formalised a “council”, led by the Prime Minister, “overseeing strengthened working”.

I am going to come to the document that lies behind the press release in a moment. Of the five things the Government say this is going to achieve, they end with the principle about conflict resolution:

“Resolving disputes according to a clear and agreed process”.

I am trying to seek consistency in this Bill, which has been severely criticised for the relationships it is trying to and has to build with the devolved Administrations. At the same time, we have another document, setting up more machinery of government, which will look at resolving disputes. I understand that resolution of disputes is in the common frameworks procedure, but there is very little in the Bill about how the devolved Administrations can resolve disputes. I suspect—I am pretty certain—that there will be a lot of criticism over the coming months and years from the devolved Administrations.

In the document which lies behind the Prime Minister’s announcement, about the review of intergovernmental relations, there is a two-page section in which the first paragraph states:

“No Secretariat”—


it is an independent secretariat managing the council—

“or government”—

and that is all Governments in the United Kingdom—

“can reject the decision of a government”—

again, that is any Government—

“to raise a dispute.”

So this is a dispute mechanism which has clearly been put in place by the Government to provide an opportunity for the Administrations to raise their disputes. I do understand that if it is enshrined in law, if the legislation is there, it makes it trickier, but as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, asked, what happens when somebody wants or objects to an interpretation, particularly that of the Secretary of State, and this process escalates?

The Bill contains a lot of procedures which could well lead to a dialogue between the devolved Administrations and the Secretary of State. There is also a huge amount of what is called “guidance”—which we shall come to later—and a number of documents are going to emerge which will perhaps put flesh on the bones of some of the things we have been talking about in the Bill.

My question is this: will this arrangement announced by the council and by the Prime Minister, no matter what this Bill comes to and no matter what the processes described in it are, allow, as the intergovernmental relations document states, any Government to bring a dispute before all the other Governments? There are 30 or 40 lines and another page about how that dispute has to be resolved and the use of an independent secretariat.

If the right relationships as described in the document from the Prime Minister were built into this Bill, I would rather hope that it would minimise the necessity for such a dispute mechanism to arise. My test of this is to ask the Minister the following question. Given the announcement, and given the availability of this procedure, is there anything that he can see apart from the legislation before us that a devolved Administration could not refer to this council? If that is so, there is a strong case for making it easier for the devolved Administrations to engage through the mechanisms of this Bill without having to go through all the processes which would lead to the dispute mechanism outlined by the Prime Minister. I am asking for consistency, and I hope that the Minister can provide it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Chandos (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord McNicol, spoken by my noble friend Lady Blake. It is one of the most important amendments that the Committee has considered. In my speech at Second Reading, I made the point that the combination of transparency and comprehensiveness of the data that is provided and the time period allowed to interested parties to appeal it lies at the core of the effectiveness of any new regime. As my noble friend Lady Blake pointed out, there is asymmetry between the length of time given to public authorities to put data into the public domain and the very short time period proposed for interested parties to appeal it. Can the Minister name any instance where the Government are subject to a one-month deadline for a significant decision that they have to make?

I do not even think that the one-month deadline is particularly helpful in reducing the workload that may come to the tribunal because, the shorter the deadline, the more an interested party may feel that it has to submit an appeal without having had the time to do the work fully to assess the position. So I urge even more strongly than my noble friend Lady Blake that the Minister considers the case for a change to three months, and I ask him to say, if he is not willing, why he thinks that the one-month deadline is fair and effective.

[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?