Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak with mixed emotions on this piece of legislation. On the one hand, I voted to leave, and I have had no reason in my mind to change that view. I think the world order based on the individual nation state, which emerged after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, has still some time to run. It may come to an end, but the nation state remains the basic building block, and that is why I voted to leave. As a result of that, my noble friend will be pleased to hear that I enthusiastically support the purposes behind this Bill—the “untangling” I think was the phrase he used in his opening remarks. But I am also a democrat, and I believe very strongly in maintaining an appropriate balance of power between the Government and Parliament.

Members of your Lordships’ House will be aware that, until Tuesday a week ago, I was for three and a half years chair of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and some of our work has been very kindly referred to already this afternoon. During that three-and-a-half-year period, I am afraid I saw the Government begin to accrete powers at the expense of Parliament in various ways, but specifically by the use of what I call framework or skeleton Bills, in which only the broadest sense of the direction of policy travel is given, and all the detail is given in secondary legislation. Of course, we know that secondary legislation has a much lower level of scrutiny and, in particular, that it cannot be amended. Over the past year, the SLSC has produced a number of reports detailing this. Government by Diktat has been referred to already. My last task as chairman was to sign off the report we made on this Bill, which we titled Losing Control?: The Implications for Parliament of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. From that, it will be seen that I am not entirely happy with the position we now find ourselves in.

There are three things my noble friend could usefully think about to try to bridge the gap with those who would wish to support the principle and yet have some difficulty with the practice. The first would be the establishment of a proper triaging process to distinguish what is serious from what is trivial. Of the 600 or 700 regulations the SLSC looks at every year, probably more than two-thirds are quite uncontroversial, and I dare say the same will be true when we come to consider the 4,000 or so EU regulations that will come before us. There is no need, in my view, to get the vapours about that. But we definitely need a better procedure to examine that small number of regulations that carry significant policy implications. The procedure should, in my view, at the very least carry the opportunity for Parliament to ask the Government to think again.

I have two further quick suggestions in my last 45 seconds. First, I hope the Government will undertake to produce impact assessments for all the regulations they intend to change. It is important, because good impact assessments are not just about the money; they are how we learn about the thinking that went on, how the Government reached the decision they did and why certain policy options were adopted and others were not. Finally, we need a statutory undertaking to undertake post-implementation reviews—PIRs—on all regulations. PIRs show what happens when hope meets reality, and it is an important part of good governance that Governments should learn from past mistakes. It will be exceptionally important that we do that as we enter this new phase in our way of governing ourselves. I hope my noble friend can consider those as a way of meeting some of the concerns around the House without losing his particular objective.