European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Faulks and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I know the Committee will not believe this but the three noble Lords I most want to thank are the noble Lords, Lord True and Lord Faulks, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard. I thank the noble Lord, Lord True, for raising my spirits. I love the words “Labour Government”; I will use them again and again. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, because sometimes when you know what you are talking about, you assume that everyone else does. I had got something wrong and it was not clear. I was not talking about how, under this Bill, the current EU rules will be put into legislation by statutory instruments. We are content with that. We will in due course argue about whether the relevant word should be “necessary” or “appropriate”, but that is not the purpose of this amendment. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, for giving me the opportunity to say that.

The purpose of the amendment is about looking way into the future and future-proofing what we are putting into UK legislation and to make sure that it cannot then be tampered with by means of statutory instruments. It is not about the current work that many of our colleagues on the statutory instruments committee are about to undertake. We are talking about the future. I again thank the noble Viscount for giving me the opportunity to discuss that.

I say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, that I said at the beginning of this discussion that we would come on to how we deal with the bigger issues involved in this matter. However, today, I want to discuss the human, environmental and consumer rights that we sometimes risk losing sight of when we get into the technicalities of law and how we are going to hold on to those. As I said, I absolutely accept that we may deal with the technicalities later.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, said that certain bits of retained EU law could possibly be dealt with by statutory instruments and others by primary legislation. Elsewhere in the Bill judges are allowed to deal with measures on a case-by-case basis. But in the case of retained EU law, we have a difficulty as I think he said that he was happy for the Government to decide which measures could be dealt with by secondary legislation. Perhaps that is the nub of the problem.

[Lord Faulks]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. I perhaps ought to clarify that I was responding to a question from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I meant the Government in the course of the Bill rather than the Government simply deciding that they wanted to do it.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I thank the noble Lord. I apologise for misunderstanding that point.

I am afraid there was an offline conversation between the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, and myself. I do not know whether he referred to that when he spoke but in that conversation he gave a very good description of the aims of the Bill—namely, that after we have examined it and are satisfied that all the stuff is going into UK legislation, everyone should know what the rules are and the Bill should achieve that outcome. That is what this measure is about. It is about whether we leave it to Ministers in the future to decide which bits of retained EU law they can deal with in secondary legislation. As my noble friend Lady Drake said, we need to restrain executive powers as ministerial promises will not suffice. That in a sense is where we are with this issue.

My next point relates to the issue raised by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel—namely, that we as legislators look at something but may forget sometimes to undertake consultation, be it with families or anyone else. That is one of the other great advantages of primary legislation: it is much more out there for people to talk about.

The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, as always trumps everything I do and comes up with much better arguments. However, I too had not noticed the lack of a time limit in Schedule 8. I am sure that we shall want to return to that.

As we have heard a number of times, the Minister said that there has been no parliamentary scrutiny of the current EU law, so anything we get in future will be better. I remind him that much of that law goes through the Council of Ministers, where we have a Minister, and through the European Parliament, where we have British MEPs. Therefore, the idea that there is no democratic involvement from the Brits is not quite right. We are listening to the concerns of consumers, workers and, indeed, business, about the Bill and I think there will be amendments to it to address some of their concerns. However, we are looking now to future-proof it to ensure that we do not give Ministers rights that we may not want them to have. We will come back to that in the broader discussion. However, for the moment, all noble Lords will be very pleased to know that I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 21.