Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, I support this amendment and have little to add to what the noble Lords, Lord Faulkner of Worcester and Lord Berkeley, have stated. The inland waterways of this country are one of its glories and, in the present age, the public resort to and benefit from the inland waterways can only increase. We as a Parliament have for too long done things which were well intentioned but which, in the event, proved to be counterproductive. One of the great problems of the present age is that the public are so confused about different bodies, particularly in the voluntary sphere, that a great deal of the good will and potential effect of a body such as the Inland Waterways Advisory Council can be inadvertently lost by chopping and changing. As all Members of the House will know, the inland waterways are covered by a wonderfully diverse mix of mainly charities—I am patron of the charity that looks after the River Stour, for example, but there are hundreds of them. To have a competent, known, well regarded advisory body taking a valuable overview and bringing together the often conflicting demands and interests of the individual charities with their different responsibilities seems indispensable. If that is right, then for mercy’s sake let us leave this body alone and not at some future date have to resurrect it with a loss of public identity and continuity in the mean time.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I will pick up from where the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, has just left off. I have a past interest as a Waterways Minister, which is a fantastic job. I cannot remember if it is part of the portfolio of the noble Lord, Lord Henley, but if not, that is regrettable, because it provides a welcome relief from most of the rest of what one has to do. I also have a present interest as a member of the board of the Environment Agency. British Waterways is the dominant organisation for canals and the Environment Agency is the dominant organisation for rivers. An amendment recently tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, points the way that the Government are thinking of going in handing over British Waterways to a trust in the third sector and transferring the Environment Agency’s navigation and waterways responsibilities to that body.

I am, broadly speaking, subject to a few caveats, in favour of that sense of direction. Eighty to 90 per cent of British Waterways will probably be covered by that new organisation, which will make it a very dominant organisation. All the small navigation authorities to which the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, referred, supported by volunteers, charities and local efforts for relatively small stretches of canal and river, look to this body for technical advice and for a forum where they can sit and be treated equally with the representatives of British Waterways and the Environment Agency. They will be the people who will most miss out as a result of the abolition of this body. British Waterways, including the Environment Agency’s navigation aspects, will take care of itself, and the charitable status, I hope, will ensure that it does a good job for the public and the environment. However, the smaller navigation authorities need this body and we should seek to retain it for them, certainly for a significant period beyond any transformation of the status of British Waterways, as my noble friend Lord Berkeley suggested.

[Lord Grantchester]

My Lords, I compliment the speakers this evening on giving their thoughts on the Inland Waterways Advisory Council. I suggest that this body has been included in this part of the Bill to add some weight, but the timing has not been properly considered. In rural areas, the inland waterways are a thriving enterprise for a lot of people. Volunteers undertake restoration and development work, which offers enjoyment to many people along the waterways, reconstructing our industrial heritage and providing diversification opportunities in rural areas. I tease the Minister when I say that we are not looking at a dead parrot. This situation is working extremely well. I ask him to consider the thoughts of all the noble Lords who have spoken tonight, to clarify some of the background as to why British Waterways is one of only nine bodies in the Public Bodies Bill being made into a charity, to expand the Government’s thoughts on why they think that British Waterways is best suited to charitable status and to say how, given its activities, it is likely to be able to raise the funds necessary to continue to provide all these excellent opportunities in development and restoration in rural areas for our wonderful waterways.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I rather rashly intervene to express my general support for the thrust of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. I declare an indirect interest as my wife is a member of the planning authority in the area in which we live—Braintree in Essex—and I know that some of these problems occasionally land up with that committee. I am not an expert, but I think what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said about the need for some kind of expert advice in areas where the issue is whether there is an agricultural need is important. I hope that my noble friends on the Front Bench can meet it.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I agree with the general thrust of the approach by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. I am certainly not arguing for the status quo, although this body has helped to solve a number of acute cases for individual retired farm workers, farmers who desperately need the accommodation to attract further labour and local authorities faced with the housing crunch to which my noble friend Lord Clark referred, so it has been a useful institution. The demand is diminishing, but it is important that we know what will replace this body.

I will make an additional point to the Minister because it goes to the heart of the way in which we are dealing with the Bill. In Schedule 1—and the same will apply to some extent to other schedules—each body has a particular situation to deal with and the Government appear to envisage different consequences of the abolition of those bodies. It is important that this House knows what is in the Government’s mind to replace what has hitherto been an important, if diminishing, function. It is important that we have this in writing, not simply as a reply in the debate. Some of us argued for a Select Committee procedure that would have allowed that to happen away from the Floor of the House, if necessary, and on a different basis of consideration. In this, as in so many other areas, we need to know the total picture. I make a plea to the noble Lords, Lord Henley and Lord Taylor, that as we go through the stages of this Bill, and it looks as though it will be quite a lengthy process, they provide us with that kind of information so that we can have a more rational debate. I make the point on this institution because it is one about which I do not disagree with the Government, but we need to know in all cases what is intended to replace these bodies.

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, I remember the 1976 Bill coming through Parliament. I was on the Benches that he is sitting on now. I thought it was a bad Bill then, and it has remained a bad Act, in particular with regard to ADHACs. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said that this body is necessary. If it had been necessary, it would have been compulsory to have consulted an ADHAC. As it is, it is a purely voluntary agreement that an ADHAC can be used for consultation with the housing authority if necessary. The vast majority of cases are dealt with directly with the local housing association, so “necessary” was not the right word to use in this instance.

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said that there are 40 to 50 cases a year. I question that. My information is that the number is almost in single figures now. Sixteen ADHACs have some 10 cases a year in total. That means that half of them are not doing anything at all. It is high time we got rid of them, and I thoroughly support my noble friend in this. Could I just ask him whether, when we come to the follow-up legislation, he will propose to get rid of all 16 ADHACs at once, rather than one by one?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in his argument and agree with pretty much everything that he said. I caution the coalition Ministers that they will frequently find that propositions that have been put to successive Governments and their Ministers get dusted off and re-presented to new Ministers. Sometimes—I do not wish to impugn the noble Lord—Ministers are credulous enough to accept them, even though their predecessors have rightly looked at and rejected them. To my knowledge, the proposition of abolishing the agricultural wages board has continued for the past 40 years. It has come less from officials in MAFF or Defra than from pressure from the dead hand of the Treasury and the free labour marketeers in what is now BIS. That pressure is evident here. Certainly that pressure was put on Mrs Thatcher’s Ministers, who rightly resisted it. It was put on John Major’s Ministers, who also rightly resisted it. To my certain knowledge, every Secretary of State and junior Minister for Agriculture in the previous Administration was under such pressure and we rightly rejected it.

The noble Lord will say that things have changed. He has some justification because two things have changed slightly. First, for most of that period most farmers were in favour of maintaining the wages board. That is no longer entirely true. The upper echelons of the NFU have started voting with the workers rather than the farmers, who have taken a rather more jaundiced view of the wages board, even though it has meant a fairly balanced result for both sides in the long run. Many others, who are not necessarily in the top echelons of the NFU, are still favourably inclined towards the wages board because it saves small farmers a lot of work in trying to establish the appropriate rate for a skill and all the other terms and conditions. They would otherwise have to go through all that themselves. Indeed, some farmers’ organisations are still in favour of the wages board. The Famers’ Union of Wales, for example, is in favour of retaining it and opposes this proposition, as do the Welsh Government. We are talking about a body that covers England and Wales; there are devolution issues here. As far as I am aware, the proposition in Scotland is entirely separate. The noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, who I am sure is one of the more benevolent employers north of the border, will find that there are Scottish farmers who still wish to retain the process. It is not true to say that all farmers, as employers, are now opposed to the continuation of the board.

Secondly, although we now have the national minimum wage, it deals only with the absolute minimum, as my noble friend Lady Prosser pointed out. There are differences of only a few pence in that area. The whole structure of skill rates and different time rates and the whole issue of non-wage benefits, which were dealt with by the wages board, are not dealt with by having a minimum wage. The whole grading structure is in peril if this board is abolished.

As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, that is not to argue that the present structure could not be hugely simplified. Indeed, the previous Government looked at bringing forward a legislative reform order that would have reduced the number of committees, simplified the process and, to some degree, made the process for the agricultural minimum wage equivalent to that for the minimum wage. That was a sensible proposal, which would have had to follow the procedure of the Regulatory Reform Act. At the time, some noble Lords were concerned that the Act was moving towards the Henry VIII end of the spectrum. However, compared to this Bill, it was an absolute doddle for those who wished to preserve parliamentary privilege. It is probably more like a Henry III Bill in that Henry III had to compromise with Parliament. I believe that on some of these issues the Government will have to compromise with Parliament. The process that is being proposed in the Bill, as I have said several times, needs to be addressed.

The agricultural labour force of more than 150,000 in England and Wales—and others who use the wages board as an analogy to avoid engaging in separate bargaining with their employees or their unions—is still an important feature. I hope that the noble Lord can answer the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves: what will replace the board? Is there any role for the Low Pay Commission to look at aspects of this—at the particular rates and situations that apply to agriculture? Is there really any prospect of collective bargaining if it is not underwritten by the law? Under the legislative reform order that we contemplated, it would have been possible to have moved the agricultural wages board to a more bilateral structure but still with the legal underwriting. That would probably have been a sensible move. I was certainly in favour of it. We could have moved towards it.

If we leave this entirely to collective bargaining, as applies in other sectors, there is, as my noble friend Lady Prosser indicated, the difficulty of organising in this area. I do not have to declare an interest since I am not a member of Unite, although I have some family connections to it. These days I am a resident of Dorset, which is still a major focus of agricultural workers. There, the union’s ability to organise is a little better than it was at the time of the Tolpuddle martyrs, but it is not easy. In so far as the wages and conditions of agricultural workers in Dorset have dramatically improved since those days, they owe a lot to the 100-year operation of the agricultural wages board, rather than the benevolence of employers or the state. It is unlikely that it will be easy to move to a normal situation of collective bargaining in this area.

Perhaps this is not so much a West Country issue. The people who are pressing most for this are horticultural employers, who have a very odd workforce structure. The work is hugely seasonal for obvious reasons. Much of the workforce is made up of migrants, many of whom are very vulnerable. Employers tend to try to pay the minimum rate, if not less. In the horticultural sector, a lot of the seasonal workers, many of whom have skills and qualifications in their own countries, will be pushed down to the minimum rate. The only legally binding rate will be the minimum wage. That, I can see, is desirable for the more ruthless employers in the horticultural sector. However, it is not the equivalent of a situation where you are a permanent employee in a major area of agriculture.

The other question is: who will now enforce the minimum wage in agriculture? It is difficult if we are talking about farms with two or three workers or farms where there are many seasonal workers who move on after a couple of weeks. The agricultural wages board had a rather minimal inspectorate attached to it, but who will now do its work? The Revenue imposes and enforces the minimum wage, but it is unlikely to tramp up and down every farm to find out how much every worker is paid. Enforcement is also an issue.

The question to those of us who oppose the dropping of the wages board is: why is agriculture so different from other areas that it requires a continuing minimum standing wage? The fact is that every other wages board was abolished. The wages councils were abolished in the 1980s and 1990s and the average wage in those sectors dropped significantly. If this is a blatant wage-cutting exercise, we should be told. If, however, it is more that we want to develop a skilled, effective and competitive workforce in agriculture, people must recognise that there are several difficulties in this sector beyond those that have already been referred to.

I shall mention some in particular. My noble friend Lady Prosser referred to the rather close relationship that agricultural workers inevitably have with their farmer employer, particularly on small and medium-sized farms where there are only two or three employees. That is fine while it is good. As soon as it breaks down, however, the power relationship between the employer and the individual farm worker is incredibly imbalanced and the worker is incredibly isolated—literally, in geographical terms—because there are no workmates in the same situation.

The other dimension is that the farmer himself or herself is under severe pressure, to a degree that many other small businesses are not. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, made reference to the role of the food chain in pressuring farm costs, particularly in relation to the supermarkets. I am glad that this Government have decided that they will take up with slightly more enthusiasm than the last Government the proposition for an ombudsman who will look at the contractual relationships between the farming industry and other small providers of food and the grocery chain. I very much commend them for that. However, this is moving in the opposite direction. Within a week or two of the legally binding minimum wages disappearing from horticulture and agriculture, the buyer from the supermarkets will say, “You now do not need to pay the wages that you have previously paid. You can lower your costs and your price to us and provide a significantly lower rate”. The cost benefit, therefore, of cutting wages does not go to the farmer. The employees will lose their living standards and the profit from the whole process will go up the chain to the big processors and supermarkets. If that is what the Government want, it is not in the interests of the agricultural sector. Indeed, it is a downward spiral in the agricultural sector and something that they have recognised needs to be counted in other respects.

Another nefarious dimension of the labour conditions in the agricultural labour market relates to the seasonal and migrant workers operating in many parts of agriculture but particularly in horticulture and in the larger-scale vegetable sector. I was grateful to hear on Second Reading the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, ask why the Gangmasters Licensing Authority was in this Bill at all. Speaking as the ex-Minister who brought in that piece of legislation, I am glad that she and others have recognised what a successful operation that is beginning to be. However, it is an uphill struggle because, in this sector, the conditions of the workers are open to the widest exploitation. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority has to check on a number of things. It clearly has to check on health and safety at work and in housing. It checks on the employment and migration status, tax and national insurance of the workers—and rightly so. The abuses in all those areas tend to be cumulative.

Another area—one that is absolutely essential in triggering the Gangmasters Licensing Authority’s interest—is whether the Agricultural Wages Board provisions are being followed. If the legal basis for that disappears entirely, the Gangmasters Licensing Authority’s ability to check whether appropriate wages and conditions are being paid by employers—many of whom will push their situation to the limits if they possibly can—is removed and a whole section of agricultural workers will lose one of their most important protections. These are just some reasons why agriculture, particularly the seasonal dimension of agriculture, drives us to think that a legal minimum ought to be retained.

I seriously ask the Government to reconsider this. I am not against the simplification of the wages board. I am not actually against the abolition of the wages committees. However, a basic minimum level of remuneration in agriculture would potentially avoid pretty substantial abuses, which I am sure that all parties in this House wish to avoid. I ask the Government to think again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Whitty]

Apologies if the Minister was moving on to this point, but do the Government have an impact assessment of the effect of the abolition of the legal minimum on wage rates, given that when each of the other wages boards was abolished the rate in that sector fell? Clearly, there are always some who are paid more than the minimum, but have the Government done that calculation? If so, I think that we should know.

[Lord Henley]

I do not think that it is necessary for that work to have been done. As I said, we believe that with the abolition of the board the industry will be able to operate more flexibly, which would lead to more job creation and better opportunities. What the noble Lord and others have been asking us to do is describe what picture, as they put it, we see for the future. I believe that it is one where it is open to the industry to come together to set up its own system. Again, I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, who said that the NFU ought to be out there seeking to put something together. What I did not hear from the representatives of Unite or Unite’s predecessor, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, was whether they were prepared to come together with the NFU and put something together. I do not see why the NFU, Unite and other industry representatives cannot come together and create their own advisory committee to discuss these matters. We do not think that it is necessarily a matter for the Government.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Whitty]

18: Schedule 1, page 16, leave out lines 5 to 9

[Lord Whitty]

Amendment 18 relates to the Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides. Essentially, this is a probing amendment, but it raises some rather wider issues. I am very grateful to see the noble Lord, Lord Henley, on the Front Bench. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is quite pleased to see him on the Front Bench as well, because clearly, these matters are in the Defra area but, as I said, raise wider issues. Those wider issues are: why are those two committees being abolished when many other similar committees are not being touched; and in what way will they be abolished?

I must apologise to the Committee, because I was not here earlier today to speak to an amendment in my name, but my noble friend Lady Henig moved it ably. She pointed out that the list in Schedule 1 includes apples and pears—this is not a horticultural question but because they are not like with like. The Government propose that some of those bodies in Schedule 1 be abolished; that some of them revert to Ministers; and that some have their powers and functions moved to other bodies, public and private. It is not clear what will happen to the independent advisory capacity of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances. If they are to be abolished, full stop, that raises a serious issue.

I declare a current interest as a member of the Environment Agency board, which has relations with both those committees, but, more particularly, because I am a former Minister dealing with much of the Minister's current portfolio, and specifically with the Advisory Committee on Pesticides. It was always important to have independent advice. Pesticides have always been a controversial area. If the powers revert to the Minister, the Minister will be seriously—if he will excuse the expression—exposed in this area. It is very important also that advice is independent and is seen to be independent. Of course, the Minister does not have to accept any advisory committee’s advice. When I was in the noble Lord’s position, there were times when I did not accept the advice of the pesticides committee and indeed referred the issue of bystanders and their vulnerability to pesticide exposure to what I felt was the higher authority of the Royal Society. That is a matter for the Minister to decide.

If we abolish these committees and all assessment reverts to the Minister and his civil servants then you lose that independent advice, or do the Government intend to transfer the responsibilities of these committees elsewhere, to other bodies? For example the Environment Agency and the HSE have some responsibilities in this area. Alternatively, the Minister could, I guess, invent a non-statutory body of experts to advise. That has slightly less of an independent air than these two bodies.

I think it would be somewhat dangerous if Ministers decided they were going to go for a more informal arrangement in relation to the whole array of scientific advisory bodies, which exist right across departments and certainly very substantially in Defra. It is dangerous for Ministers as well. The Committtee on Hazardous Substances advises Ministers on dangerous chemicals in air, water and the soil, and on nanomaterials, which have a significant element of controversy, in relation to policy and science and the effect of some of these substances.

Pesticides are also a crucial area because there is a conflict of interests here. There is conflict between the farmers and the agriculturalists and the horticulturalists on one side and local residents and those pursuing other pursuits, and environmentalists and environmental bodies concerned with air and water quality and food standards, food quality and the effect on biodiversity and so forth.

The Minister has to balance the different interests in this area and it is helpful if he has advice which is independent and statutorily-based as one part of his decision-making process. The Minister also has a significant Civil Service element. The pesticides safety division in Defra is a very effective body. However, it looks at systems and monitoring and what is happening in regulations. Of course regulations in this context are quite often European regulations. Some of the most controversial proposals in the pesticides field are in European regulations that are coming on stream. Some elements of the agricultural industry think they will eliminate pesticides in particular specialist areas, so there is quite a delicate political balance in that respect.

It is not just farmers who are affected by this. Quite a lot of pesticides are used in parks and gardens, so there is a big public sector element that has to follow the advice. It would be better if the Minister, when making the regulations, was basing them on the advice of a publicly defensible independent body. All of us who are occasional gardeners are affected by this as well. In some ways the most dangerous area is in people’s own gardens. While the pesticides advisory committee and the PSD will have a whole list of pesticides you are no longer expected to use, I am pretty confident that at least one of my neighbours has a shed load of pesticides that are probably banned by the Geneva Convention, never mind the pesticide regulations. Enforcing it in these areas is quite an important role, so that the public are informed as well as those who have an interest in horticulture and agriculture.

There is a very good and very specific reason why the pesticides advisory committee should remain independent, should remain statutorily-based and should give protection to the Minister and his colleagues. It is also slightly odd that these two committees are the only advisory committees in the Defra family scheduled for abolition. Yet Defra has, I think, 20-odd committees, including the Food Standards Agency and about another dozen of a similar status to these two committees.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I hope I can answer some of the points put by the noble Baroness and her noble friends. I thank her for the point about Defra and the fact that I was going to respond regarding this amendment and a number of others in relation to that department. I appreciate there are quite a number of Defra arm’s-length bodies that are being referred to and I hope I can deal with them in due course as they happen. It may take a day or two before we cover them all but I will try to deal with them as and where appropriate.

The noble Baroness also said that some of these bodies have existed for a very long time indeed. I suppose she was appealing to my nature as a hard-line reactionary Conservative who does not want to see anything change at all. I see the noble Lord nodding in agreement—the arch reactionary here speaks. I am not sure that I am. Things do move on and from time to time we have to change them. For that reason I will not be able to support the noble Baroness in saying that everything should continue as it is just because it always has existed in the past.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, talked about vultures and leopards. I saw one of his noble colleagues, on the edge of the Chamber, who found some of these remarks faintly comic. He should not have done; I did not find them comic because the points were serious. For some reason, when you hear remarks about vultures in this House late at night—well, I think all noble Lords know what I mean. I will certainly take on board the points the noble Lord was making.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, spoke about the Food Standards Agency and asked if we are going to populate these bodies with the wrong people. That is certainly not going to be the case and I hope to deal with that when I deal with the substance of the amendments.

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for moving these amendments. I appreciate there are four of us who have served in Defra or its former bodies, so we all know what it is like.

The first point I should make is that the bodies are listed in alphabetical order and we are now dealing with the first of the Defra organisations; there will be others later as we work through Schedule 1, as the noble Lord knows. He also knows perfectly well that theirs is not the only advice that Ministers receive—I was grateful that he stressed this—and that when Ministers receive advice from such bodies they are not bound to accept it. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for nodding his head on this point. In the end, Ministers of whatever persuasion have to make a decision. They take advice from all kinds of experts and then make a decision. I believe one of my colleagues, who is not in this House, wrote a book on the subject called Ministers Decide, or something like that, but we all write books of that kind.

The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred to the problems that neighbours might have with the some of the things we use in gardens. At that point one thought, “Gosh, what about North Korea?”. However, I take on board what the noble Lord had to say about the problems that different things can cause in different ways.

The amendment seeks to remove the three committees—it relates also to the Northern Ireland committee—from Schedule 1 so that we would not be able to abolish them. I shall set out why we wish to abolish them and explain how we wish their work to continue. I acknowledge that those committees have provided independent, expert and impartial advice to Governments of all political persuasions on hazardous chemicals and pesticides. That advice continues to be of value and I can assure the Committee and all noble Lords that abolition of these three committees in their current form will enable us to put in place better arrangements for the work to continue through expert scientific committees.

This reflects the work that the Cabinet Office has been doing with Sir John Beddington, the government Chief Scientific Adviser and the head of the Government Office for Science, and departments to identify more accountable and effective ways to deliver independent, high-quality scientific advice to government to meet the objectives of the public bodies reform programme and the principles of scientific advice to government.

We also need to recognise that statutory regimes for hazardous chemicals and pesticides are increasingly driven by EU legislation. Those three expert committees will remain independent and be able to put advice direct to Ministers, where appropriate, and will adhere carefully to the government code of practice for scientific and advisory committees.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, asked what savings would be available as a result of this. I wish to make it clear to the noble Lord that we are not looking particularly for savings; the savings, in fact, will be negligible. We are reorganising how the department commissions and applies scientific evidence and looking at ways to do this more coherently and efficiently. These bodies are being reconstituted as expert scientific committees to the department rather than as statutory NDPBs. That will allow them to provide better advice to us in an equally independent way without any particular savings. I hope the noble Lord will accept that.

With that explanation, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment at this stage. Failing that, we will have to look at it again at a later stage.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for explaining some of the background to this. It was intended as a probing amendment and I think that we have probed something out of it. The Minister said in the latter part of his remarks that this was part of a discussion of the best way to deliver scientific advice, in conjunction with the Cabinet Office and the Chief Secretary. My query arose not so much because I want everything to be set in aspic and that no change should take place, but because there should be a rationale for it. After the Minister’s remarks I still do not quite understand why these two committees, both of which are particularly sensitive in a political and media way, do not deserve a clearly statutorily-based form of advice, whereas a significant number of the rest of Defra’s advisory committees are not on this list, and, if you took it across Whitehall, obviously the picture is wider.

This is why I argued that, in order to have this debate on a rational basis, we need some background from the Minister, or the Minister for Science or from BIS saying what our overall approach to advisory committees is. If it is, in general, that we move away from statutorily-based committees to expert panels, there may be an argument for that. The problem is that we have not heard that argument and that this seems to be differentially applied to bodies within the same department, let alone across Whitehall as a whole. There is a much bigger issue behind this that, at some point, the House is going to have to look at before we can easily give our consent to including some of these bodies on one or other of the schedules to the Bill.

I am glad that the Minister has, in a sense, opened that up, because maybe there is a bigger background that we will come back to at a later stage of the Bill. I am certainly not utterly convinced that the expert panel is much different from a statutory body in terms of the quality of its advice or procedures and, clearly, there is no great cost advantage. I still think that Ministers have, themselves, the protection that, if there is a statutory body giving them advice, at least that part of their advice is clear. Where there are other aspects to it and they take a different decision, that is a separate matter.

Clearly, I have opened up something here and I am glad that I have. For tonight, I will withdraw the amendment, but I think that we will probably be returning to this, or a wider debate.

Amendment 18 withdrawn.

Queen's Speech

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, this is a wide-ranging debate and I intend to say a few sentences about every area of it. First, I warmly welcome the noble Baroness to her position on the Front Bench. I am very gratified to see her there. Not only has she done the hard slog of opposition, but—I declare my interest as chair for at least a few more weeks of Consumer Focus—she was a distinguished consumer champion at the National Consumer Council. I am not entirely disinterested in saying this because I hope that she will ensure that her department, BIS, which has not always been that conscious of consumer issues, albeit that those issues are central to its remit, does not ignore the consumer dimension or the employee dimension. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Henley, whose remit in Defra coincided with a little part of mine and that of the Lord Speaker before me. I think that the advice that we would give him is that nothing is quite as complicated as people tend to tell you that it is. I will leave it at that.

On the BIS part of the agenda, we have had references to financial regulation. Now that my noble friend Lord Myners is no longer influential in this area, I fear that we are not clear in which direction we are going. The banking industry and, above all, those who depend on banking services need to know what the future system of regulation will be. Will we abolish the FSA? Will we give a bigger role to the Bank of England? A commission is being set up to decide those things, but people want certainty. Above all, I hope that these issues are decided not on the basis of relatively arcane arguments about Glass-Steagall or whatever, but on the basis that we get a better service to business and to individuals from the banking system. We want more competition and more diversity, but not at the expense of less service and less choice to consumers.

There is a whole bit on regulation in the coalition agreement, in the manifestos and in earlier papers, particularly from the Conservative Party. Despite the fact that some of what the Government are arguing is sensible, the first thing that is picked out—the one-in, one-out process—is completely bonkers. The previous Government had a go at it. It cannot be worked in that way. There are other things in the programme on which the Government should focus. Looking at whole groups of regulation and the operation of a sunset clause for regulators would be much more effective than trying to have a first-in, first-out process. That is a bit of advice to those who believe in better regulation rather than less regulation.

On the Post Office, I was a bit surprised to see almost exactly the proposition of my noble friend Lord Mandelson, of which I was not entirely in favour, back on the agenda. I am not clear whether we are looking for capital for the Post Office or for a new organisation—presumably one of its competitors—to take over its management. Either way, we need certainty within the organisation. The employees need it, but above all customers, businesses and individuals need to know which way the Post Office is going. I am not at all convinced that the Bill that seems to be envisaged will do that.

On the environment and energy agenda, I have just two or three points to make. We need to pursue all aspects of the low-carbon agenda and, behind that, we need to reconvince the public that the fight against climate change is indeed one of the priorities of this Government and of society as a whole. There have been some rather unfortunate beginnings, but I hope that the Government can recover from them. The cut in help to business in terms of low-carbon investment is not a particularly helpful signal, nor is the dropping of part of the heat initiative. I am less confident than the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, that dropping the Infrastructure Planning Commission will mean that nuclear power can play its proper part. I hope, therefore, that the concentrations on energy policy will be to provide not only for greener energy but also for a fairer cost of energy to consumers, whether they be businesses or individuals.

I welcome, I think, the commitment to the green deal, which will enable householders effectively to take out loans to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. However, that does not address seriously the position on fuel poverty to which my noble friend Lord O’Neill just referred. It will help a lot of middle-income groups and improve energy use among household consumers, but it will not tackle the problem of fuel poverty. We need a clear indication from the Government of where they intend to go on that front.

I am running out of time, so I will not go into detail on agriculture, which the noble Lord, Lord Henley, will no doubt be relieved to hear. On transport, the one thing that I want to do is to compliment the coalition on its decision not to go ahead with the third runway at Heathrow. That was a brave and important decision and I hope that the Government can follow through on the environmental agenda and on other decisions about the environment.

I was not going to mention this, but I shall, as the noble Lord, Lord Monson, who is no longer in his place, raised it. There is one apparently bad decision on the part of the Government. I do not believe that it is helpful to society or in the interests of rural areas to repeal the Hunting Act. I had some most unpleasant times in this House when I promoted the Bill. Straight repeal, which the Government seem inclined to allow via a Private Member’s Bill, is not a licensing system, is not a middle way and does not allow for local discretion; it is a straight repeal. That would be a regressive step by the Government and I hope that they do not give priority to it.