Lord Rosser
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Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill
Lord Rosser Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, we move now to Part 4 of the Bill—I hope, briefly—dealing with aviation, shipping and rail. I hope that these government amendments will find favour with your Lordships. During Committee, I acknowledged the concern of noble Lords that the Bill as drafted provided only for indirect parliamentary scrutiny of an authority-to-carry scheme made under Clause 22. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee expressed a similar concern in its report on the Bill.
In recognition of your Lordships’ concerns, the Government undertook to consider further how we could provide for more direct parliamentary scrutiny of such a scheme. I am pleased to inform the House that Amendment 12 provides for direct scrutiny by laying before Parliament regulations subject to affirmative procedure which bring a scheme, or a revised scheme, into force. With this approach, the scheme comes into force by regulation. This will allow for schemes to be similar in format to the 2012 scheme, which carriers will be familiar with and where the use of plain English makes it more easily accessible to foreign-registered carriers. Amendment 12 enables this. Amendment 13 is a consequential amendment to Clause 23. I beg to move.
Lord Rosser (Lab)
We had an amendment in Committee when this issue was discussed, in the light of the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee in particular, its view that Clause 18 constitutes a significant delegation of powers to the Secretary of State and that the Bill should be amended so that the powers are exercisable by statutory instrument. In their response, the Government said that they were considering the report of the DPRRC, would reflect on the concerns expressed in the debate and then return to this issue on Report. The Government have done that with their Amendments 12 and 13, which we support. We thank them for their further consideration of this issue.