Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) (Amendment) (No. 7) Regulations 2021

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Monday 22nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has already mentioned the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments. I have served on that committee for about two years now. It is one of the less well-known workhorses of the parliamentary scrutiny system. It is very technical in nature and staffed by a very effective and thorough legal team. It is always a busy committee but recent years have been particularly active, with the continued volume of EU exit SIs and those, such as the measure today, relating to the pandemic. When you strip away all the legal technicalities, at root the committee is concerned to see that the law is correctly applied and that agreed parliamentary procedure is adhered to.

This SI and others like it are a very good example of the kind of issues that the committee highlights because it is rather exercised by them. In this case, “variant of concern” and “variant under investigation” are used but with no definition or meaning. The department has said that they do not need to be defined here because they have a commonly understood meaning in the scientific and health community. In practice, that may be true but there is an important point here: the law should be unambiguous and understandable to everyone. There are other examples where the department has included a definition, so it is not even being consistent.

Secondly, without going into the detail of our report there are drafting errors, which the department acknowledges. Three of them have had to be corrected by a subsequent instrument and the fourth, it says, will be. This is not a criticism of the department—drafting at pace is challenging—but it highlights how hard it is to keep track of exactly what Parliament is passing.

The committee has concerns about many trends and will shortly produce a special report which highlights them. The conflation of statute and guidance has exercised the committee and other noble Lords. This, compounded with the practice of government announcements and their attendant publicity, followed by regulation that does not match, is a major concern.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Desai, has withdrawn so I call the next speaker: the noble Lord, Lord Naseby.