Commencement Orders

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth in speaking to his admirable choice of subject for this short debate and to congratulate him on the speech with which he introduced it.

He has described our mutual participation in the Commission to Strengthen Parliament. It was set up in 1999 by the then Leader of the Conservative Party, my right honourable friend the present Foreign Secretary. It was chaired with characteristic scholarship by my noble friend, who was already in the Lords by that time. It contained three other former Conservative MPs, of whom two were by then Members of your Lordships’ House, the third being Matthew Parris, as well as a distinguished woman Oxford academic to counterbalance my noble friend, and finally me, as the only sitting MP.

By a remarkable coincidence, which occurred while I was sorting out books at home over the past fortnight, I came across our final report, which I had not seen for years—my library policy is one of accumulation rather than specific acquisition or ambition. I immediately rescued it from any potential cull, particularly one made by my wife. By a further remarkable coincidence, I received a letter from my noble friend drawing my attention to this debate and reminding me that our report had included the recommendation which underlies this debate and which he has just quoted. I have to confess that I had forgotten the recommendation. Since this debate may become a modest quarry for future students of the subject, I remark that that recommendation appears on page 43 of our report. It is the last major paragraph in a section headed, “Legislative Scrutiny”, and on page 63 it is the final item in a list of seven recommendations entitled “Legislative Scrutiny: Primary Legislation”. Its provenance was in the text of a Bill introduced also in 1999 by Viscount Cranborne, from whom we had taken oral evidence. His Bill was entitled Parliamentary Government.

On rereading our report this week, I was agreeably surprised by its universal good sense and also by how many of the issues that we raised have been taken up since. Nor am I in any way receding from the particular recommendation that we are debating. Its text runs, as my noble friend has demonstrated, to less than 150 words, so there is no great substance to disembowel, and it possesses a logic that invites agreement without provoking disagreement. The five years that we allocated as the fallow period during which the sections of an Act could survive untrammelled following Royal Assent without commencement orders have the additional virtue of being at a sufficient distance in time from Royal Assent for everyone to have forgotten who the Minister was who had fruitlessly introduced these now lapsed and neglected propositions and invited parliamentarians to use parliamentary time to dissect them. Moreover, those five years were a good test of any continuing relevance or any circumstance that made the sections less relevant after all. In a world where parliamentarians and commentators regret the sheer amount of legislation passed, their removal from availability as law may be a salutary prophylactic.

Of course, it is not as easy as that. There is a school of thought that does not want to throw anything out of Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, but parliamentarians have never hesitated to set limits for local authorities to monitor the duration of planning permissions being granted before the permission lapses, and these constraints are a notable stimulus to timely action. Overall, there would be a bonus in parliamentary time saved and intelligent scrutiny and courage.

As ever, I have been helped and my horizons extended by the excellent briefing provided by our Library. In this instance I particularly enjoyed the guidance for co-ordinators and policymakers and appreciated the statistics on Acts passed, especially when reinforced by subjects. The statistics show the volume of Acts passed in given calendar years and the subject breakdown in sessional years, which makes comparison less than totally accurate, but over a period of 30 years that prevents false or distorted impressions. My own computation was that over the period from 1983 to 2012 almost exactly 20% have been devoted to constitutional Acts and those embracing criminal justice.

Finally, there is a moral to be derived from the coincidence of the debates today in which my noble friend Lord Cormack is taking part. Here in the Moses Room, 50 of us have been given 60 minutes on a narrow but important issue, while elsewhere 30 Peers are going to be debating the monumental Magna Carta over 90 minutes and Back-Benchers will have 60% of the time that is allocated to us here to debate that massive subject. Of course it concentrates the mind and of course there is no way to adjust the imbalance but it does cast a searchlight on securing productive returns from the parliamentary time that we invest.