Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Anderson of Ipswich and Baroness Fookes

Committee stage
Wednesday 20th November 2024 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

If this amendment is agreed, I shall not be able to call Amendments 2 or 3 by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 133, to which the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, has just spoken and to which I put my name. This evening’s inaugural Lord Judge memorial lecture in legal history will address the early modern practice of legislating by proclamation without Parliament. According to the advance publicity for the lecture, Professor Sir John Baker will say that this practice

“may be compared with those resulting from our ‘elective dictatorship’, Parliament having become an instrument whereby a modern Government can exercise more absolute power than that formerly attributed to the King’s prerogative”—

a point often made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, himself. The truth of those words is demonstrated by this Bill, about which the Constitution Committee remarked—with our customary understatement —that

“several powers in the Bill are widely drawn and could facilitate the making of law that goes beyond the updating of existing rules to involve the making of new policy”.

When the EU makes new policy, as it did with the general product safety regulation, which will come into force next month, the process is properly and appropriately democratic. A road map and a public consultation in 2020 were followed by a Commission proposal in 2021, the usual substantive reports by parliamentary committees, a provisional agreement between the Council and the Parliament, approval by COREPER and IMCO and, eventually, adoption of the GPSR by both Parliament and Council in 2023. The process was more extensive, but so is the end product. The GPSR contains a detailed list of factors to be taken into account when assessing the safety of products. It sets out the obligations of manufacturers, authorised representatives, importers, distributors and—a difficult one—online marketplaces. It outlines a traceability system and makes provision for market surveillance, reporting and recalls. Detailed powers, of course, are delegated to the Commission, but the guiding principles were decided on by the legislature at an appropriate level of detail for a legislature.

My point is not that we should or should not follow the substance of what the EU has done. It is that where such wide-ranging matters of policy are engaged, it is not appropriate for Parliament to abdicate its power to the Government as entirely as this Bill proposes to do. Matters that in Europe are decided upon by the Council and the Parliament are here reserved to unamendable and, in practice, unblockable statutory instruments under this Government as they were under the last.

The noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, like the Constitution Committee, quoted the Attorney-General’s recent Bingham Lecture, in which he criticised excessive reliance on skeleton legislation and expressed the view that,

“the new Government offers an opportunity for a reset”.

I believe that the Attorney-General has talked the talk with complete sincerity about this issue, but his words do not sit happily with this Bill. The practical question is how are we going to walk the walk? A comprehensive solution would be to adopt the Hansard Society’s proposals for a new system of delegated legislation, a concordat agreed between Parliament and government to reset the boundary between primary and delegated legislation, and a new Act of Parliament to ensure that Parliament can calibrate the level of scrutiny to the content of a statutory instrument.

Limiting ourselves to this Bill, two other solutions are possible, short of the wholesale omission of clauses that was recommended by both the Delegated Powers Committee and the Constitution Committee. The first would be to copy the amendments to what is now Section 14 of the retained EU law Act 2023, tabled in the names of the noble Lords, Lord McLaughlin and Lord Hamilton of Epsom, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and myself. These would have provided for a sifting committee of both Houses, or of the House of Commons, to identify proposed regulations that are particularly deserving of parliamentary attention, and for regulations falling into that category to be amendable by agreement of both Houses under a power modelled on Section 21 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Those amendments were passed by large majorities in your Lordships’ House in May and June last year, with the support of Her Majesty’s Opposition, and drew support from all parties in the Commons before eventually falling at ping-pong.

The second solution, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, in his Amendment 133, is, by comparison, gentle indeed, and if the noble Lord were a fast bowler, he might describe it as a loosener. No power of amendment is claimed for Parliament. A joint sifting committee would simply have the authority to refer a statutory instrument to a process requiring parliamentary approval if the regulations made a substantive change to the law, or if they had not been consulted upon. A substitute for European levels of democratic engagement I am afraid it is not but a pragmatic improvement to the Bill it is, and I look forward to seeing whether the Minister sees merit in it or whether, as I fear, this is an issue to which we will have to return with renewed energy on Report.