Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Thomas of Winchester and Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope

Monday 28th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, this amendment is tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester. I think I can dispatch this with as much speed as possible. It is an important probing amendment to try to persuade the Government to clarify the position of the Social Security Advisory Committee beyond doubt in the context of this Bill.

As we all know, the Social Security Advisory Committee sheds light on some of the more obscure regulations and regulatory powers that flow from primary legislation and has an important additional duty to give advice and assistance to the Secretary of State. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, who I think is the responsible Minister, is very careful in his duty to the Social Security Advisory Committee, which is welcome. It is welcome as far as the committee is concerned as well.

After Royal Assent, there is a process that has been going on for some time. Members of the Social Security Advisory Committee—they are technical experts, in the main—can self-refer pieces of secondary legislation where they feel there is an important point to make, to explore or to advise Parliament of. They sift every statutory instrument, and they use their discretion to self-refer. It all works rather well. As far as I can recall, until the Social Security Administration Act 1992 primary social security statutes were much more expansive and descriptive and most had their own time limit at which the Social Security Advisory Committee could take charge of regulations and self-refer. It was usually after a period of something like six months, but sometimes different statutes made different arrangements.

After 1992, there was an understanding that six months was the most appropriate period because Parliament could in theory be considered to have introduced all the salient facts, discussed them and come to conclusions that would not change much in six months. I think things have changed since then, because we are now dealing with skeletal primary statutes. This Bill is no exception. There must be up to 200 regulations in here. In the past we have seen some regulations being scrutinised by the Social Security Advisory Committee only after six months of the implementation of the provisions in the individual clauses.

This is a probing amendment. I hope that the Government will go away and think carefully about this. In this Bill in particular, because it is a significant change of direction, regulations will start pouring out of the department, so we will have many hours of happy discussions downstairs in secondary instrument debates almost as soon as this Bill gets Royal Assent. I want to be clear about exactly where the SSAC fits into the future of that. The implementation of the Bill and the rollout of provisions will, in any case, take a long while, so circumstances could change quite dramatically not just financially but socially, culturally and in others ways as well. I for one would feel safer if we had an assurance—even if it was in the Bill—that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that, six months after Royal Assent and when the ink was dry after Her Majesty’s pen had scraped the official signature— if that is what happens these days—across the goatskin, the Social Security Advisory Committee would immediately thereafter have access to the regulation-making power that flowed from the universal credit and all the other provisions in this particular legislation.

Obvious questions flow from that. Does the SSAC have the discretion, authority or interest in picking what regulations to concentrate on? Speaking for myself, I trust its judgment in doing that. If, for every 10 secondary instruments that it looked at, it said that Parliament should look at two, I would be absolutely content to leave it to make that decision and use its discretion in that way. That is based on years of working with the committee and being confident that its members know what they are doing and have regard to the public interest, as well as having the depth and knowledge of experience that they have arrived at over many years. I can give colleagues comfort that they could do that properly.

I am not even going to ask for more resources. I would like to, but in these straitened times it would be hard to say that as we could double the workload we need to double the staff. I am not saying that. I am asking for clarity about when its remit commences. I think that we will all need help in trying to understand. I know that the Minister has done his best to provide the Committee with draft regulations as soon as they become available, but there are still huge gaps. We are taking a lot on trust. As legislators, we could feel more confident that we were on top of what was being done in Parliament if the Social Security Advisory Committee had unfettered access to discretionary self-referral of statutory instruments after six months after Royal Assent. I beg to move.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, my name is also on this amendment. My noble friend has explained the six-month rule. I would say that the DWP has recently interpreted it creatively. The rule was originally brought in partly to allow for the quick implementation of regulations and partly to stop the wasteful duplication of the same evidence being produced for the statutory consultation undertaken by the SSAC as for the parliamentary debate on the Bill. It dates back to 1973 and the predecessor committee, the National Insurance Advisory Committee, but that reasonable rule has been stretched beyond reason when a year, say, after Royal Assent, whole sections of Acts can be activated, at which point the DWP starts the clock to begin the six-month exclusion period.