Deregulation Bill

Lord Skelmersdale Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, Schedule 18 amends the Poisons Act 1972. It introduces a common licensing system for the acquisition, importation, possession and use of poisons as well as of chemicals that can be misused to make explosives—termed explosives precursors—within Great Britain.

Current poisons controls are outdated and ineffective. In 2012, the Poisons Board made a number of recommendations after being reconstituted to review the Poisons Act 1972 as part of the Red Tape Challenge retail theme. These included that the Poisons Act 1972, the Poisons Rules 1982 and the Poisons List 1982, which are owned by the Home Office, should be amended to reflect current retail market practices. It also recommended that greater clarity should be given regarding inspection and enforcement of retailers and businesses involved in the trade of poisons, which are very often of course for household use. Schedule 18 does that.

In making these changes, we are aligning controls of dangerous poisons with new regulations that control the sales of explosives precursors that are susceptible to being used to create explosives to commit terrorist attacks. The Control of Explosives Precursors Regulations 2014, which implement EU regulation 98/2013 on the marketing and use of explosives precursors, came into effect on 2 September 2014. The amendments to the Poisons Act 1972 will create a streamlined, cohesive regime that will make it easier for retailers to implement and reduce costs, because there is only one regime to follow.

Schedule 18 removes the current requirement for businesses to annually renew a local authority listing that allows them to sell common household products. This will save businesses some £20,000 a year. Paragraph 1 abolishes the statutory Poisons Board, whose constitution is written into the Poisons Act 1972. Abolishing the statutory body would mean that appropriate and specialist advice can be sought.

The purpose of Amendments 82 to 87 is to make minor technical amendments to Schedule 18. Amendments 82 and 83 provide for the reporting duties in new Section 3C of the Poisons Act 1972 to apply to explosives precursors at all concentrations, as required by EU regulation 98/2013, which is directly applicable in the UK. New Section 3C will impose reporting duties in respect of both poisons and explosives precursors, and is therefore wider than the EU regulation. However, the reporting regime in respect of explosives precursors must be compliant with that regulation.

Amendment 84 creates a new power by which the Secretary of State may, by regulations, make provision modifying new Section 3A of the Poisons Act so far as it applies to any supplies that involve dispatch of a regulated substance to Northern Ireland or export of it from the United Kingdom. Currently, the proposed new Section 11(6) of the Poisons Act provides that any reference in the Act to supplying something does,

“not include … export to a person outside the UK”.

Amendment 87 will remove this aspect of the definition. Amendment 84 will enable the Secretary of State to make regulations about export from the UK, and dispatch to Northern Ireland, having regard to EU regulation 98/2013, in particular its territorial scope, and other prevailing circumstances.

Amendment 85 clarifies that the 12-month time limit for commencing criminal proceedings for offenders under the Poisons Act applies to summary offences only. There is generally no limit for triable offences.

Amendment 86 introduces a transitional provision relating to maximum statutory fines in the magistrates’ court pending the commencement of provisions in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which will remove such maxima.

Amendment 87 is purely consequential on the new regulation-making power introduced by Amendment 84. That is to say, it changes the definition of supply for the purposes of the Poisons Act so it does not automatically exclude exports. I beg to move the amendment and that the schedule stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Skelmersdale (Con)]

My Lords, I have been prompted to rise to my feet on Amendment 84, to which the Minister has just referred. I will ask a very simple question: are there no regulatory supplies from Northern Ireland, given that Amendment 84 refers to,

“any supplies that involve despatch of the substance to Northern Ireland or export of it from the United Kingdom”?

Of course, Northern Ireland is included in the United Kingdom, so I wonder if the Minister could, at some point in this debate, answer my question.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this; I think the Minister might have moved “clause stand part” in error at the end of his comments, because my next amendment is a clause stand part debate. On the Northern Ireland question, my understanding is that Northern Ireland is part of UK, so I was rather surprised that the direction was to Northern Ireland and from the UK. That is a similar point to the one made by the noble Lord, so was it just an error in the drafting of the legislation?

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I am still very unhappy. Most of this is obsolete, which is self-evident when you read it. However, we cannot be absolutely certain because we have no independent evidence that it is of no practical use. That is the worry that we ought to place on the record.

[Lord Skelmersdale]

My Lords, it seems that we are discussing, in an amendment to Clause 82, the whole subject of Schedule 20. Five or six years ago I put down a Question for Written Answer, “To ask Her Majesty’s Government” what the oldest piece of legislation still on the statute book was. It dated from the 14th century, though I cannot remember what it was. Looking very quickly through the items in Schedule 20 I notice that there is nothing older than the 19th century. Why? It is a mystery. I certainly go along with what the noble Lords, Lord Sharkey and Lord Rooker, said about an appropriate and responsible body to delve into and probe obsolete legislation. I could not agree with them more.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, although I may be being a bit previous in saying this, I think that I am the only Member of your Lordships’ House who so far has sat through every minute of the debates that we have had in Second Reading and Committee. I draw two conclusions from that. Today’s open and discursive discussions illustrate that it is a strange experience to be able, in your Lordships’ House, to roam so widely through these uncharted territories of legislation. Some of it, as has been pointed out, goes back a long way, though not all that far back. We have also tried to come to some conclusions about how we might look at this.

There are two conclusions to draw. First, the exercise in pre-legislative scrutiny that was done in the Bill is a very good thing. The reports that this scrutiny generated, and the actions that were taken and the improvements that were made to the Bill by that process, exemplified by my noble friend Lord Rooker, are things that we should bear in mind. Secondly, we need to utilise that experience better. Perhaps it is something for another time. The periodic appearances of my noble friend Lord Rooker and the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, have always generated, when they are here, a much better and more focused discussion in our considerations than when they are not; they have been present a lot and have raised good points. It has struck me that when we have been able to interrogate and listen to what they have been saying we have learnt a lot more about the process that we otherwise do.

That leads to a broader truth that came out in all the presentations that we have had around this amendment so far; we are probably rather ill equipped in Parliament under the processes that we have to follow to do the deep and important thinking about some of the legislation that has gone or is currently going through the House. I absolutely take the point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and my noble friend Lord Rooker that it is inefficient for Parliament to try to scrutinise line by line material which is obscure and possibly not very well expressed in terms of the material we are given and the notes.

I do not want to go through each of the paragraphs in Schedule 20, but I wish to share with the Committee two things about the process. One is that without a Keeling schedule relating to the particularities of the Bills being amended, it is almost impossible to work out what they are. One simply does not have the expertise or even the time to do that, and it would not be fair to ask civil servants, even if they were able to do it, to help the Opposition on this matter. For example, in paragraph 1, the best I could get from the Bill team—and I thank them very much for it—was a set of summaries in which they tried to characterise what is being done by the various enactments. The first, which is an amendment to the Companies Act 2006 simply says:

“The provisions to be repealed were originally included in the Companies Act 2006 to address an anticipated transitional issue in relation to moving the rules requiring audits of some small charitable companies from the Companies Act to charities legislation … This means the provisions are no longer needed”.

You do not have to be an expert in logic to realise that there a bit of imaginative leap in that. I do not know what legislation is being referred to, and I have not been able to track it down, so I am taking at face value what is, I am sure, good advice that the original legislation has indeed been overtaken by changes in charities legislation, but I do not know that. Therefore, I am not able to scrutinise as effectively as I would like the work that has been done.

These are points already well made by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and my noble friend Lord Rooker, and I do not want to go over them. I have a number of points throughout paragraphs 1 to 42 on these matters. I could go through them, but it would take up the good will in this Committee, so I will not do it. However, it makes the point for me that we have to have a body that we can trust as a Parliament to certify that the Bills or legislation that we wish to see excised from the statute book are no longer of practical use. That body has to be independent. It has to have the time to do research, it has to be able to certify to Parliament that it has done a full and comprehensive study of the work, duly taking evidence and drawing conclusions from work carried out in other ways, to provide a draft Bill to be taken forward. Otherwise, we are cutting corners, as my noble friend Lord Rooker said. We simply cannot be certain that what we are doing in this process is not allowing infelicities, injustices and other things to happen in areas where it would be wrong for Parliament to take things forward.

I said I would not go through them, but I cannot resist just one more example. In paragraphs 14 and 15, there are proposals to excise Sections 6 and 7 of the Atomic Energy Act because they are no longer of any use. I could quote the whole of the Explanatory Notes, but I shall jump to the end. They state that the measures define “prescribed substances” that include,

“uranium, plutonium and other substances prescribed by order which can be used for the production of atomic energy or research”.

Then they state—I do not know how to judge this statement—that,

“the United Kingdom no longer needs to search for these substances as it has a steady supply from politically stable countries”.

Need I go on? What sort of judgments are implied in that? To whom and to what Minister has that been put up as a submission? Which Minister has signed off in his or her mind that we no long require for our future energy sources for the longer term to have the right to search for uranium, plutonium and other substances which we need to keep our atomic energy systems going because we can get them easily on the open market from politically stable countries? Okay, Lord Copper, I get what you are at, but this is not sufficient to make a decision of that nature. I may be extending to make the point, but it is typical.

I signed up to this amendment because I thought it was the right thing to do. Having listened to the persuasive arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, the detailed criticisms made by my noble friend Lord Rooker and the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, about how neat and necessary it is to have a proper system here, it seems to me that we need to think very hard about this.

I appeal to the Government; they would not lose this clause if they decided to accept what is proposed here. They could take credit for making sure that the standards that we set in this Parliament are for the long term and for the good. That would be something that we would all applaud.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I do not think that there is a perfect answer to the earliest one being in the 19th century. If the purpose of this is to try to remove redundant legislation, it can be redundant if it no longer serves any useful purpose. An example is the Sea Fish (Conservation) Act 1992, which is very recent—indeed, I remember taking part in the debates on the Bill that became that Act in the other place. But the purpose of this provision is to remove from the statute book measures which, for example, may have expired or served their purpose, which have been superseded by other legislation or which are simply no longer relevant because they relate to an activity that no longer takes place. I accept that flying kites still takes place, but it takes place in a legitimate way. The fact that there was no provision identified prior to the 19th century I do not think in any way detracts from the ones which have been included, which I would certainly argue that Parliament has had a proper opportunity to consider.

[Lord Skelmersdale]

Surely the noble and learned Lord will appreciate that the statute book is far, far too long. Therefore, if you can get rid of legislation from between the 14th century and the 19th century, somebody ought to jolly well have a go at it.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I am in sympathy with what my noble friend says: the statute book is far, far too long. There is probably someone behind me sweating as I say this but I am sure that if he has candidates that he wants to bring forward to addend rather than amend Schedule 20 before Report stage, and if he gives us sufficient time, they could be looked at to see whether they would be worthy of inclusion.