Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Thomas of Gresford and Lord Judge

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Judge (CB)]

It is the lion that represents Millwall, is it not? I shall be brief, but not as brief as perhaps I should be because, with respect, this clause is totally flawed. I shall not go over the debate I had with the Minister over what is now the Wales Act, but we still have to face the fact that under the clause as it now stands following the debate on Amendment 129, the Secretary of State in London will be empowered to overrule the legislation of the elected Assembly. There is no arguing; that is what it says, and that is what it means. I understand that the Minister would have no intention of telling us anything other than how he envisages this power being used, and of course I accept it from him, but the power is being given to wipe out the enactments of the National Assembly for Wales without so much as a reference to it.

In my respectful submission, it is subsection (2) of this clause that is so unacceptable: the Henry VIII clause, the legislation that will set aside the legislation. It will give power to the Secretary of State to say, “I don’t like this legislation any more” or “I don’t like this part of this legislation any more, I’m going to get rid of it”. That is what we are empowering if we allow this to go through.

With Henry VIII clauses, you have to ask whether they are justified. Here, you ask the question: how is it justified? The answer to that question is that it is not justified. I looked through the Explanatory Notes. They state:

“Part 3 Final Provisions … Clauses 37-40”—


that covers Clause 38—

“and 42 are self-explanatory”.

That is it. No doubt the clause is self-explanatory, but, with great respect, so what? Self-explanatory is no sort of justification. It is not even an attempt to justify.

Assiduously, I hunted further and found what the department’s memorandum tells us the clause is for:

“There are a number of consequential changes being made by the Bill, particularly those flowing from the addition of a new procedure for modifying neighbourhood plans, restricting the imposition of planning conditions, and amendments to compulsory purchase legislation”.


That is a very neat summary of a very complex piece of legislation, but this is the justification that the department advances:

“It is possible that not all such consequential changes have been identified in the Bill. As such it is considered prudent for the Bill to contain a power to deal with these in secondary legislation”.


Is that any sort of justification?

Going back to the wording, if,

“the Secretary of State considers appropriate”,

is an entirely subjective discretion, entirely uncontrolled in any way by the legislation. Is that really what the department wants? Well, the department may want it, but we are being invited to give powers to a Secretary of State years down the line to repeal an Act of Parliament, the whole Act, the Act that noble Lords have spent four days working on in this Committee. By this provision, if it comes into force, it can all be wiped out. That is what Henry VIII means.

I repeat that I totally accept the good faith of the Minister, I accept it completely and utterly, but he will not be the Minister 10 or 20 years from now, and the list of legislation that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, gave us reminds us of how long this legislation could last. So because the department thinks there is a vague, undefined possibility that may arise in the future, I respectfully suggest that we are being landed with a hugely dangerous piece of legislation because it is totally unjustified. Of course the future is unsure. We all know that; Shakespeare told us that. It is the most important line he wrote. We know that the future is unsure, but it is not a justification for giving literally sweeping—sweeping away—powers to the Executive. That is not how we should operate.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

I wholly support everything that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, just said, and what the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, said in introducing this debate. The matter that concerns the Delegated and Regulatory Reform Committee is on page 9 of its report, at paragraph 54. Not only is the power “very wide” in scope, but it,

“is to make whatever provisions—including ones amending and repealing Acts of Parliament … We note that it has become standard practice for provisions of this type to be included near the end of a Bill”.

This is appearing all the time. It is really an insurance policy: “We might make a mistake, and if we make a mistake we do not want to have the trouble of admitting it; we will just get some secondary instrument through Parliament, and that will be all that we have to do”. That is not a sufficient justification for such a wide power.

The committee suggested that at the very least, the power could be restricted by some type of objective test of necessity: to where it is necessary—to “where we have made a mistake” if you like—or to where something important has been omitted. We need something that gives substantive limitation to such a widely expressed power.