Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Friday 24th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, here we go again: statutory instruments being debated after they have come into effect. This is not parliamentary scrutiny; it is government diktat. The Minister will argue that this is necessary in an emergency, and of course I accept an element of that, but it is part of a more general trend. The legislation going through the House on agriculture and immigration gives Ministers wide powers to set policy in the future by statutory instrument. I know that this is common practice in some southern European democracies but I thought that the whole point of Brexit was supposed to be to reassert parliamentary sovereignty, not to concentrate executive power in the hands of civil servants and hard-pressed Ministers. The British Parliament is becoming a helpless adult in old age by comparison with the growing authority of the European Parliament. We can force change. If we refuse consent to these SIs, the Government will have to agree to a more effective system of pre-implementation scrutiny with the power of amendment.