Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord Fox and Baroness Andrews

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. It is a measure of the speed with which the Bill has gone through every stage that these questions should be raised in the first place, but I leave it to the Government to reply.

I also wish to pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, about whose fault it is that this process has been so slow. I was appalled by the comments of a previous leader of the House of Commons; I thought he traduced civil servants who cannot answer for themselves. In our committee, we have seen these officials working day and night, against the clock, to make some sense of a process which has simply not been sensible. To suggest that they have somehow been subversive, deliberately slow or incompetent is a real slur on the professionalism of officials and of the Civil Service. I hope that every Member of this House agrees with that.

My question to the Minister is this. I am grateful for what has been achieved, but I look at that list of 600 and am reminded of the 600 people going into the valley of death, bravely being sacrificed. There are some in this list that refer to common frameworks—for example, safety of food and emissions. There is no apparent reason why they are in there and I do not know how many there are. On behalf of our committee, I would like a list which tells us—

[Lord Fox (LD)]

We have a list; there are 240.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

I am out of date already. That is excellent; I am very grateful and withdraw my question. I am delighted the Government have been so responsive.

My final point is on parliamentary control. I will certainly be supporting the amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. It identifies two key risks. The Government have agreed in principle to a sifting mechanism, and it makes no sense for this batch of amendments to be left out of that sifting mechanism for the very reasons which the noble and learned Lord put and which I am now putting to the House: there are still elements of this list which require explanation, transparency and understanding. I would like the opportunity to see that process in place, as it affects these first regulations. This is a modest proposal and it is perfectly reasonable that the Government should do that.

There is also the much larger and more powerful question of parliamentary control. We have had very dramatic language from the two scrutiny committees of the House and we debated this at length in Committee. The case has been partially conceded, but by no means wholly. It once again reveals the limitations we face with secondary legislation and the way that primary legislation has been stripped out. It is essential that this batch goes before the sifting committee, in good faith, so that we can test the process and see whether it works and is fit for purpose for the more complex ones that will come later. I agree with the amendment.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord Fox and Baroness Andrews

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

The presence here of the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, is a good indicator of what we will get in the next group: the appropriate department covering the appropriate amendments. These amendments were not put down yesterday. This is not a letter that you receive from a Minister—we gave warning of these amendments. A Minister from the relevant department, the Department for Transport, should and could have been here to answer the questions, instead of a Minister saying, “It’s not my department. I can’t answer”. I am pleased to welcome the noble Lord for the next group but perhaps, as a lesson going forward, we could have the right Ministers here.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

We have been searching for some clue as to the criteria for what will be retained and what will be revoked, but we have not had any clarity—hence these hours of debate on safety of seat belts and so on. The Minister used the term “unnecessary” regulations and, in the famous letter, we have the line:

“For example, through removing unnecessary or unsuitable regulations or consolidating multiple regulations into one, it will be possible”,


and so on. Can we have a definition, in writing, of what the Government consider to be an unnecessary or unsuitable regulation? That may give us a clue as to the direction of travel on which regulations will be kept and which will be lost.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Lord Fox and Baroness Andrews

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 12, I will also speak to Amendments 27, 38, 46, 72, 97 and 160 in my name. These amendments would remove the Bill’s regulation-making power, which is fully in line with the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Its report is a comprehensive review of these issues; your Lordships will be pleased to hear that I will therefore not reiterate them at length. Later, we will hear the wise words of my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford, who will describe that your Lordships’ House is approaching a watershed on this issue. He is of course right; this train has been coming down the tracks for some time.

A while ago, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, gave a lecture at King’s College London entitled “Ceding Power to the Executive: The Resurrection of Henry VIII”. He made the stark point that parliamentary sovereignty is the antithesis of executive sovereignty. The two concepts are mutually contradictory. The democratic process is not meant to give—and our constitutional arrangements are not meant to provide us with—executive sovereignty. The burden of the noble and learned Lord’s argument was that Henry VIII powers, although paradoxically conferred upon the Executive by none other than Parliament, are an affront to parliamentary sovereignty. That lecture was held in 2016. Since then, we have seen an acceleration of the erosion of parliamentary sovereignty through these means.

As the House of Lords Constitution Committee put it in its report of the Strathclyde review some five years ago:

“Delegated powers in primary legislation have increasingly been drafted in broad and poorly-defined language that has permitted successive governments to use delegated legislation to address issues of policy and principle, rather than points of an administrative or technical nature.”


This Bill pushes that envelope yet further. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee was clear. It described some of the powers in that report as either “extraordinary” or “unprecedented”. To justify these extraordinary and unprecedented powers, the Government cite the need for legislation to evolve. The possibility of unknown unknowns required a yet unknowable legislative response and a yearning for law-making speed. None of these justifications is extraordinary and none of them is unprecedented.

I beg to move.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendments in my name in this group are for the most part identical to those of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, although in some cases they are wider in their supplementary implications. It goes without saying that I agree with everything he said—and everything that I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, is about to say—about the whole range of excessive and inappropriate delegations. Of course, my amendments follow the advice of the DPRRC; I declare an interest as a member of that committee.

I will make a few general points about what the Government are trying to do in these clauses and how they have justified them. I speak for myself but I suspect that I also speak for many members of the committee —certainly for our distinguished chair—when I say that we have reached a point of almost total exasperation with the Bill. The DPRRC was set up in 1992 to monitor and control the excesses of executive power and the temptation for Ministers and officials to try to avoid parliamentary interference and take inappropriate powers. So it is hardly new, but in recent years, we have been sorely tested— not least on the limits of our vocabulary. Indeed, the DPRRC has described these powers as “extraordinary” and “unprecedented”.

We have seen the increasing use of skeleton Bills and statutory instruments not for the delivery of policy but for the design of policy and for carrying the principles of legislation within the secondary framework. Most recently, we have seen mounting evidence of a Government that will go to endless lengths to avoid scrutiny. This Bill is in a class of its own because of the sheer volume and significance of the Henry VIII powers. Of the 12 delegated powers in the Bill, seven are Henry VIII powers, allowing Ministers to amend or repeal significant provisions of the Bill itself, as well as other primary and secondary legislation. We used to protest when only one Henry VIII power turned up in a Bill.

It sets a different tone, too, because the delegated powers memorandum, in its attempt to justify why these powers to expedite the mutual recognition principle and the non-discriminatory principle are necessary, does not even bother to try to find a convincing justification for the powers taken. In the clauses relating to my Amendments 13, 28, 39 and 47, for example, the explanations for using statutory instruments to amend Acts of Parliament cite the need for speed and flexibility to respond to unforeseen developments—the known unknowns and so on—respond to stakeholders and provide certainty. These are profoundly lazy and threadbare arguments, and Ministers and officials know that. I consider that contempt of Parliament. Secondary legislation does not guarantee speed, flexibility or certainty. Primary legislation, as we know from dealing with the pandemic, can be introduced at the speed of light and amended. Indeed, the Government have conceded in their own arguments that the Secretary of State is not required to declare that the making of regulations is required as a matter of urgency, so urgency is a false trail too.

This disingenuous use of language offered in the memorandum in regard to Clause 6(5) is a case in point. It argues that Ministers need to be able to respond swiftly to future-proof the operation of these principles so that they can be changed as and when Ministers decide that it is necessary. The DPRRC dismisses this as an attempt to completely rewrite the non-discrimination principle. When the Government argue that there is no way that they can change the definition of legitimate aims attached to the non-discrimination principles in Clause 8 other than by secondary legislation, they seem to have completely forgotten that such a thing as primary legislation exists. Indeed, in Schedule 2, for example, the assumption is that only secondary legislation is fit for purpose when it comes to making future amendments.

The powers that my amendments seek to remove are described by the DPRRC as inappropriate and ones that should be removed; the Constitution Committee endorses that. “Inappropriate” may seem rather feeble in the parliamentary lexicon; in fact, it could not be more powerful. Among other synonyms, it means unseemly, unbecoming, lacking in propriety, ill-judged and out of order. Nowhere are those and many other epithets more appropriate than what these clauses have to say about the devolution settlement. For in Clauses 3(10) and 6(7), in relation to mutual recognition and non-discrimination —the two main pillars of market access—there is the explicit instruction that, before making regulations, the Secretary of State must consult the Ministers of the devolved assemblies. The Government are required not to seek consent but merely to consult, so they

“can act without the need to introduce new primary legislation or to obtain the consent of the devolved administrations (the Minister being only under a duty to consult) even though the proper functioning of the internal market is essential to all the administrations of the UK.”

That is a direct quote from the DPRRC.

That most eloquently brings us to the fracture at the heart of the Bill, and to the reason for taking these inappropriate powers which removes them from the full attention of Parliament. It comes back to what the Government insist is the purpose of the Bill—to secure, despite the promise and the purpose of common frameworks, that the internal market will need a new regulatory structure flexible enough to meet the unforeseen demands in the future, notwithstanding that they cannot tell us what those demands are likely to be or explain how they are going to prevent lower common standards permitted by law in this Bill, or why the common frameworks are not sufficient in themselves to prevent that, or why the Bill cannot be amended in such a way as to ensure a tight fit between the common frameworks and the common purposes of the Bill. These inappropriate powers are seen as necessary to expedite what might happen in the future, notwithstanding the impact on the devolved nations or the devolved settlements, the role of Parliament, the balance of powers expressed in appropriate legislation or the integrity of the process itself.

There is a great deal at stake in this Bill, as has been said many times already in the process of the Bill. They are grave matters, and they have been drawn to the attention of this House by the two most senior scrutiny committees. I hope the Minister will find he can agree with me that these powers are offensive as well as unnecessary, and that they will be removed.