Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodhart]

My Lords, I have again tabled an amendment that I tabled in Committee, and which is now Amendment 72A. As my noble friend Lord Taylor says, the amendment involves a sunset clause. We now have government Amendment 72, which is a sort of sunset clause—it gets the clause going halfway down, towards the shadow, but not quite going the whole way. In view, however, of Amendment 72 and its wide range of supporters, I will support on this occasion Amendment 72 rather than my own amendment. That does not mean that I think that Amendment 72 is better; it is certainly a step forward but I am not convinced that it is in fact better than a simple sunset clause would have been. The effect of Amendment 72 is that after five years the Act will in reality be dead, but somehow it will be brought back to life by new primary legislation. That seems rather a clumsy arrangement, but if others wish to try it, so be it, and, as I said, I will support it.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister. We certainly support him in his Amendments 60 and 69C and we are especially grateful for the work that the Government have done on omnibus orders. We think that they have arrived at a sensible and proper solution, as the Minister said.

As for the sunset provision, when we first broached this subject in Committee, the Bill was a very bad one. That is why we wanted to sunset the whole Bill. Since then we have genuinely engaged with the Minister and reached a very good compromise. Since Committee the Bill—its content and its architecture—has been radically transformed. Although my noble friend Lord Hunt will seek further change to the Bill's architecture at our next sitting on Report, we are content that the sunsetting of the schedules is adequate. We believe it right and proper that at the beginning of every Parliament there is the potential to have what would in essence be a new Public Bodies Bill. However, we also believe that the architecture is such that it could be maintained while looking again at the schedules. By sunsetting the schedules, the bodies that are currently in the schedule will have the comfort of knowing that if nothing has happened to them within the four or five-year period, they will be free, as it were; and the bodies that are not included will know that they can continue to work efficiently and effectively without a medium-term sword of Damocles hanging over them. We are therefore very grateful to the Minister for the changes to which he has agreed, and we look forward to the adoption of the amendments in question.