Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Henley Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2010 Lords Chamber

How will the expert committees that will replace those bodies function? I ask not only in terms of openness but whether there will be a general continuity in the work of the existing bodies and in the membership of the organisations. There are a number of such questions on which we seek assurance, so I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I hope I can answer some of the points put by the noble Baroness and her noble friends. I thank her for the point about Defra and the fact that I was going to respond regarding this amendment and a number of others in relation to that department. I appreciate there are quite a number of Defra arm’s-length bodies that are being referred to and I hope I can deal with them in due course as they happen. It may take a day or two before we cover them all but I will try to deal with them as and where appropriate.

The noble Baroness also said that some of these bodies have existed for a very long time indeed. I suppose she was appealing to my nature as a hard-line reactionary Conservative who does not want to see anything change at all. I see the noble Lord nodding in agreement—the arch reactionary here speaks. I am not sure that I am. Things do move on and from time to time we have to change them. For that reason I will not be able to support the noble Baroness in saying that everything should continue as it is just because it always has existed in the past.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, talked about vultures and leopards. I saw one of his noble colleagues, on the edge of the Chamber, who found some of these remarks faintly comic. He should not have done; I did not find them comic because the points were serious. For some reason, when you hear remarks about vultures in this House late at night—well, I think all noble Lords know what I mean. I will certainly take on board the points the noble Lord was making.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, spoke about the Food Standards Agency and asked if we are going to populate these bodies with the wrong people. That is certainly not going to be the case and I hope to deal with that when I deal with the substance of the amendments.

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for moving these amendments. I appreciate there are four of us who have served in Defra or its former bodies, so we all know what it is like.

The first point I should make is that the bodies are listed in alphabetical order and we are now dealing with the first of the Defra organisations; there will be others later as we work through Schedule 1, as the noble Lord knows. He also knows perfectly well that theirs is not the only advice that Ministers receive—I was grateful that he stressed this—and that when Ministers receive advice from such bodies they are not bound to accept it. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for nodding his head on this point. In the end, Ministers of whatever persuasion have to make a decision. They take advice from all kinds of experts and then make a decision. I believe one of my colleagues, who is not in this House, wrote a book on the subject called Ministers Decide, or something like that, but we all write books of that kind.

The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred to the problems that neighbours might have with the some of the things we use in gardens. At that point one thought, “Gosh, what about North Korea?”. However, I take on board what the noble Lord had to say about the problems that different things can cause in different ways.

The amendment seeks to remove the three committees—it relates also to the Northern Ireland committee—from Schedule 1 so that we would not be able to abolish them. I shall set out why we wish to abolish them and explain how we wish their work to continue. I acknowledge that those committees have provided independent, expert and impartial advice to Governments of all political persuasions on hazardous chemicals and pesticides. That advice continues to be of value and I can assure the Committee and all noble Lords that abolition of these three committees in their current form will enable us to put in place better arrangements for the work to continue through expert scientific committees.

This reflects the work that the Cabinet Office has been doing with Sir John Beddington, the government Chief Scientific Adviser and the head of the Government Office for Science, and departments to identify more accountable and effective ways to deliver independent, high-quality scientific advice to government to meet the objectives of the public bodies reform programme and the principles of scientific advice to government.

We also need to recognise that statutory regimes for hazardous chemicals and pesticides are increasingly driven by EU legislation. Those three expert committees will remain independent and be able to put advice direct to Ministers, where appropriate, and will adhere carefully to the government code of practice for scientific and advisory committees.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, asked what savings would be available as a result of this. I wish to make it clear to the noble Lord that we are not looking particularly for savings; the savings, in fact, will be negligible. We are reorganising how the department commissions and applies scientific evidence and looking at ways to do this more coherently and efficiently. These bodies are being reconstituted as expert scientific committees to the department rather than as statutory NDPBs. That will allow them to provide better advice to us in an equally independent way without any particular savings. I hope the noble Lord will accept that.

With that explanation, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment at this stage. Failing that, we will have to look at it again at a later stage.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for explaining some of the background to this. It was intended as a probing amendment and I think that we have probed something out of it. The Minister said in the latter part of his remarks that this was part of a discussion of the best way to deliver scientific advice, in conjunction with the Cabinet Office and the Chief Secretary. My query arose not so much because I want everything to be set in aspic and that no change should take place, but because there should be a rationale for it. After the Minister’s remarks I still do not quite understand why these two committees, both of which are particularly sensitive in a political and media way, do not deserve a clearly statutorily-based form of advice, whereas a significant number of the rest of Defra’s advisory committees are not on this list, and, if you took it across Whitehall, obviously the picture is wider.

This is why I argued that, in order to have this debate on a rational basis, we need some background from the Minister, or the Minister for Science or from BIS saying what our overall approach to advisory committees is. If it is, in general, that we move away from statutorily-based committees to expert panels, there may be an argument for that. The problem is that we have not heard that argument and that this seems to be differentially applied to bodies within the same department, let alone across Whitehall as a whole. There is a much bigger issue behind this that, at some point, the House is going to have to look at before we can easily give our consent to including some of these bodies on one or other of the schedules to the Bill.

I am glad that the Minister has, in a sense, opened that up, because maybe there is a bigger background that we will come back to at a later stage of the Bill. I am certainly not utterly convinced that the expert panel is much different from a statutory body in terms of the quality of its advice or procedures and, clearly, there is no great cost advantage. I still think that Ministers have, themselves, the protection that, if there is a statutory body giving them advice, at least that part of their advice is clear. Where there are other aspects to it and they take a different decision, that is a separate matter.

Clearly, I have opened up something here and I am glad that I have. For tonight, I will withdraw the amendment, but I think that we will probably be returning to this, or a wider debate.