Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jerome Mayhew and John Hayes

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)]

I do not think I can; I thought that was an absolutely brilliant speech. I feel like a party-pooper, because I am going to drag the debate back to the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, and I can only apologise. I was going to assert boldly that I was the only Member of this House who had sat on a standards committee and drafted European regulations, but I stand corrected. There are now two of us.

At first glance, the Bill looks tiny. There are just four clauses on product regulations and four substantive clauses on metrology. There is a reason why it is so tiny: it does not actually say anything. There is no description of the changes anticipated by this legislation. There are no examples of what needs to be addressed. There is no indication of the direction behind any future decisions—nothing. Members, particularly those on the Government Benches, have referred to e-bikes and e-scooters, electrical safety, defective toys and lithium-ion batteries, to name just a few, but not a single one of those things is in the Bill. They could be. This could be a regulation Bill trying to fix the problems that have been identified, but none of that is there.

Worse than that, there is no explanation for the silence. The Bill simply makes a request of this House—of us, as parliamentarians—by saying, “Please give me, the Minister, the power to change primary legislation through regulations, including the power to create new and novel criminal offences.” This is the very definition of a skeleton Bill, where almost all the substance is left to regulations. That is contrary to an established convention in this House and the other place that the principal aspects of policy should be in a Bill, and only its detailed implementation left to delegated legislation. That is an established principle of our legislature. If we wish to depart from that, there needs to be a very good reason.

In exceptional circumstances, there are good reasons, but are there exceptional circumstances here? The issue was picked up immediately in what proved to be a hostile reception in the other place on Second Reading on 8 October last year. That was followed by a review on 15 October by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which is not some right-wing conspiracy theory group. This is not “Brexit or die”; it is chaired by Labour. It is chaired by Baroness Ramsey, and it is a cross-party Committee. By the way, in another role, she is the senior adviser to the Labour party on standards and ethics, yet her report has been entirely ignored by this Government, because it was damning in its conclusions. It said that Government guidance was that skeleton legislation should be used only in the most exceptional circumstances, but that test was “failed” by this draft legislation. As a result, that cross-party Committee, chaired by Labour, made the recommendation that clauses 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 9 all be removed. Those are the substantive clauses right through the Bill, on both sides. That is a stinging indictment of this category of draft legislation.

However, the Committee members were so concerned that they did not leave it at that. The following day, they took the exceptional step of summoning the Minister and his officials to give oral evidence. That is very rare, and it was the first time for three years that it had happened. The Committee members were clearly unimpressed by the answers—the attempted explanations —that they were given, because in a subsequent report, on 28 October, they reported that the Minister and his officials had

“failed to provide a convincing justification”.

As a result of that second damning indictment of the Government’s approach, there was some movement: the removal of some Henry VIII powers, and the addition of a duty to consult, at least in the first instance. However, other Henry VIII powers remain, and the duty to consult refers only to the first instance, not to any secondary attempts.

The Committee then produced a third report, on the Bill in its current form. It said that

“the delegation to Ministers of law-making powers in this Bill involves legislative power shifting to an unacceptable extent from the democratically appointed legislature to the Executive”,

and also that

“the Government have failed to provide a convincing justification for the inclusion of skeleton clauses in the Bill”.

Actually, I think the Government did understand what they were doing, because the Bill gives Ministers the power to make politically contentious decisions about the degree to which domestic law on product regulation and, indeed, on metrology should be aligned with EU laws. That is the real reason behind the Bill: the fear of EU alignment by the back door.

[Sir John Hayes]

My experience in this place—I am mindful of what my hon. Friend has said already—is that there are two types of Bill to beware of. The first is the Bill whose provisions are so permissive, so broad, lacking the tailored approach that I described earlier, as to allow law to be applied in a way that is not expected by those who debate it as it passes through the House. The second is the Bill that makes specific provision for delegated legislation—for subsequent action by the Government. Those two types of legislation are legislation to beware of, and I say that to Members on both sides of the House, having seen Governments of all kinds introduce such Bills which became, in the end, bad laws.

[Jerome Mayhew]

Of course I agree with my right hon. Friend, and that comes to the nub of what I want to say. Yes, inevitably we are party politicians. We have the official Opposition, we have the Government, and we have those who sit on the left-hand side of the official Opposition. Above that, however, we are parliamentarians, and some of us are quite new. I may look old, and indeed I am, but I was first elected in 2019, and an awful lot of Members in the Chamber who may be voting tonight are even less experienced than me. It takes a while to begin to understand the difference between the role of the legislature and the role of the Executive, and my profound concern is that we are at risk of handing very significant powers from ourselves, the legislature, to the Executive.

Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Debate between Jerome Mayhew and John Hayes

Report stage
Monday 9th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew]

Mention has been made during the course of this debate of cross-party consensus and what a good thing that is. In some senses that is absolutely right. We should have absolute cross-party consensus on honouring the memory of Martyn Hett and all those who were killed and injured in the Manchester Arena attack in May 2017, but I raise a note of caution because sometimes when we stop being adversarial in this place, we create legislation that is not as good as it could be. That is particularly the case where we have a very emotive issue such as this, and where there is a huge amount of personal sympathy across all the parties in the House. There is a risk that extreme circumstances provoke a natural reaction of saying, “Something must be done. This has to be prevented from ever happening again,” and we end up with bad law.

There is a good example of this risk in the Bill’s progression from its development under the previous Administration, through the election and out the other side. The initial intention of clause 2 was that the standard duty would apply to premises with a capacity to welcome 100-plus people. In my view, this would have had a wholly disproportionate impact on the kind of community buildings that I represent as a church warden, as well as on the village halls that we have already discussed. Pretty much every village hall has the capacity to accommodate 100 people. Every church, bar the very smallest chapels, can expect to welcome 100 people at a wedding or funeral from time to time. There is a tiny, infinitesimally small risk of terrorism in these typically rural areas, yet the previous Administration’s Bill would have imposed very significant costs and time commitments on volunteers. I have already mentioned a couple of times that I am a church warden and, again, I emphasise the risk of unintended consequences when we are all so keen to get on that we do not challenge each other.

[Sir John Hayes]

To reassure my hon. Friend on that subject, he will understand that those of us who have served on the Intelligence and Security Committee are fearless in holding Ministers to account, as this Minister will no doubt find out, and similarly fearless in challenging the agencies, which do such a wonderful job for us. He is right that the agencies need to be questioned appropriately and scrutinised fully.

On my hon. Friend’s second point, about proportionality, it is, of course, right that our response to risk measures the real character of that risk and is proportionate to it.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s intervention, and I am reassured by his comments.

In a previous life, I was a barrister specialising in health and safety risk and risk management, and I was later the managing director of the leisure company Go Ape—Members might not have heard of it—and was responsible for the risk management of over 1 million customers a year. We could have killed every single one of them, so I am deeply familiar with the appropriate mechanisms for risk management. One risk that has to be taken into account is that, if the response is too great or too onerous for the assessed risk, people might not think it is reasonable, leading to omission.

Effective risk management requires mitigations to be put in place that bear some relation to the severity of the anticipated adverse event multiplied by its likelihood. I am very concerned that the previous Administration’s initial proposal that these duties should apply to premises with a capacity of as few as 100 people would have broken that association between a reasonable response and the assessed risk.

I am therefore grateful and impressed that the Government have listened and changed clause 2(2)(c) to raise the standard duty threshold to a capacity of 200. To my mind, that seems a reasonable compromise to protect smaller facilities, which are, of course, most likely to rely entirely on volunteers, and are unlikely to have the financial capacity to undertake the kind of paid-for training suggested by the Liberal Democrat new clause 2 or to have enough volunteers who are prepared to accept this additional burden on their free time. I think this strikes the right balance. However, I am concerned that paragraph (a) in clause 32 introduces a power, through regulations, to reduce the figure back down to 100 without giving a reason. Why is that?

I therefore support new clauses 25 and 26, which would set minimum thresholds of 200 for the standard duty and 500 for the enhanced duty. A cross-party approach has taken the Bill this far, and it is important that that approach is maintained.