Modern Slavery Bill

Lord Patel Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Lords Chamber

I have not been in the House that long, but it is not often in my experience that Bills come here with such widespread support for the basic principles. It seems such a shame to tarnish that by refusing to acknowledge the case that we should treat the commissioner—who after all will be upholding the human rights of some particularly vulnerable groups—as part of our important human rights machinery, and according the role the independence that it deserves and requires to be trusted and effective.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

I have added my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Warner. Powerful arguments have already been presented as to why there is a need to make the role of the commissioner truly independent, and I strongly support that. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, also referred to the evidence and the comments made by the Joint Committee in the scrutiny of the draft Bill. I further add that the role needs to be truly independent. When we come to discuss the functions, as we will on Monday, there will be several amendments, including mine, which we will no doubt debate at length. Those are important amendments. If we put the two groups of amendments together, it will make it even clearer why the role of the commissioner needs to be seen and defined as truly independent.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I make a brief comment on this debate from my experience of setting up the Supreme Court. One of the concerns in moving the appellate jurisdiction from this House to the Supreme Court was the risk of its not establishing its independence from the Executive, which was of course never in doubt when the Appellate Committee sat in this House. One of the surprising struggles that we had to have at the beginning of the Supreme Court’s existence was in persuading officials in the Ministry of Justice that they did not really have any say over how the Supreme Court ran its affairs. It took some time to establish that point—and, in particular, that the chief executive, on whom the court depends for so much of its running, was to be answerable to the President of the court and not to the Lord Chancellor. Of course, that battle has been won and is now in the past, and the relationship is perfectly harmonious. But the fact that it took something like two or three years to establish that point was a lesson. It was not spelt out in every detail in the legislation that set up the Supreme Court, which was deliberately simple and easy to understand. I wish to stress that it is vital to get this sorted out at the very beginning, because opportunities for doing so later in legislation do not occur very often. I hope that the Minister will take that point into account as well as the others.