Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Blackwell Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

I can only agree with what my noble friend Lord Adonis has just said with regards to Amendment 71. However, I rise in the regrettable absence of the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, to speak to Amendment 69D. This refers to the functions of those bodies that are to be abolished in Schedule 1 and would require the Government to give a clear indication of which functions are to be retained and by whom they are to be carried out.

I draw attention to this and have become active on this Bill because of an interest of mine as the former chair of Consumer Focus. Consumer Focus is still in Schedule 1, but, as I have previously argued, that is probably the wrong place, in that the Government have indicated that they want to transfer its functions rather than to abolish them. While Consumer Focus remains as a body to be abolished, it is right that the legislation should require the Government to specify to whom its functions should be transferred. The Government’s current indication is that they wish to transfer the majority of its functions to Citizens Advice and some of its functions to a body relating to Northern Ireland law, the Consumer Council for Northern Ireland. Citizens Advice is a charity incorporated under English law and separately under Scottish law. It is not at all clear that the Government will actually transfer all those functions to Citizens Advice or, pre-empting an amendment that the Minister will move in the last group, whether Citizens Advice would necessarily agree to take on those responsibilities; as an independent charity, it has a right to refuse to do so.

Developments in Scotland and Wales may well also result in somewhat different arrangements being set up after the forthcoming elections. Indeed, arguments relating to the regulated industries are different from the general run of consumer issues. Given all that uncertainty at this stage when we are passing the primary legislation, it is surely incumbent on Ministers or future Ministers to give a clear indication to Parliament of where the current functions set down in primary legislation are going to go or whether they are going to lapse. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Newton, would achieve that objective and therefore I see no reason why the Government should not accept it, if not tonight then at some later stage.

In the mean time, I endorse the general view expressed by my noble friends Lord Adonis and Lord Dubs and by the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, that at some point we are going to have to look at the way in which we deal with the secondary legislation under this Bill, because the normal form of so doing will not be adequate for many of these changes.

[Lord Blackwell]

My Lords, I am not convinced that the additional procedures set out in Amendment 71 are necessary. I should stress that since I am a member of the Delegated Powers Committee, and a board member of an organisation that is referred to in the Bill, I am speaking in a personal capacity.

Because of the way in which the powers of the Government have been limited as the Bill has passed through the House and the Government have introduced amendments, the proposal that is now set out in the Bill for an enhanced affirmative procedure does what is required. It gives committees the opportunity to state issues and make the House and the Government aware of those issues, and gives the Government the opportunity, which they do not have normally, to amend the order to take account of those concerns. That is an appropriate and proper amendment.

However, I am nervous about transferring more power to any committee for it, of itself, to seek to amend these orders. Moving power from the Floor of the House to those committees would take the role of committees further than it should be taken. As I see it, the role of the committees works well when they are advising the House and they are raising issues. Generally, they deal with such contentious areas—

[Lord Adonis]

Would the noble Lord be prepared to give that power to the House as a whole, because at the moment there is no other means of amending a statutory instrument? If he is not prepared to give that power to the House as a whole or to a committee, he is not prepared to accept that the House has any power to amend a statutory instrument, which is the central point of principle at stake in this amendment.

[Lord Blackwell]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. I was going on to say that, if there were to be a change in procedures, the change would out-favour the one recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, to enable that debate to take place on the Floor of the House. However, I am reluctant to see a committee venture into areas that became highly controversial and that moved outside the narrow debate around the appropriateness of the regime and its constitutionality, and end up, in effect, having votes in committees that should be votes on the Floor of the House. It would be a wrong step to try to move committees into taking that view.

Given the way in which orders are dealt with, there is an argument for considering the suggestions made by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. A more significant issue is whether we ought to have and exercise the power genuinely to vote on these orders. Frankly, if we do not, it is all a bit of a charade anyway. Therefore, I support those who have suggested that it is worth, in the wider scope of things, looking at reforms to procedures to allow amendments to be made and voted on on the Floor of the House and reconciled with the other House. However, that is not achieved by the Opposition’s amendment to move to a super-affirmative procedure, which would create undesirable complications. The way in which the Government have proposed to deal with it is the best compromise within the existing structure of orders.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, on Amendment 69 and “must” instead of “may”, it is a normal convention on the whole that Ministers, if they have the power to do something, are left with that, but it is not a major point one way or the other. However, as for the enhanced procedure and the super-affirmative procedure, that is primarily a matter for Parliament to consider generally, not just in relation to the Bill. The way in which I have seen this Bill develop suggests to me that everyone in the House is agreed that there should be a procedure for a review of public bodies from time to time. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has made that very clear in moving this amendment.

We have gone a long way to developing that kind of procedure for the future, because the Bill has in it the power to continue with amendments to the schedules. It now provides for certain entities in the schedules to drop out after a time—a type of sunset clause for the schedules. Therefore, you can always bring one in. If and when another review is required—who knows, it might not be until another Government come along—the procedure that has been laid down here would work perfectly well simply by introducing a public general statute to amend the schedules. It might be among the shortest statutes ever proposed, which of itself would be a good thing.

Here we have a situation whereby, before the procedures start, you have to get the body in question into a public general statute such as the one that we are considering now. Parliament has already used its power to allow that; what the procedure should be thereafter is a matter to work out in practice as the Bill goes forward. I am not in favour of enacting the super-affirmative procedure where Parliament has already decreed the particular subject matter of the Bill. I prefer that that is left. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, suggested, this whole subject needs to be considered in due course, but not as part of the present Bill. After all, we have done a fair amount on the Bill already and there is a limit to what is practically possible.