Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [Lords]

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate. We have had excellent speeches from across the House. I think the whole House agreed on the brilliance of the speech made by the hon. Member for Erewash (Adam Thompson), and—perhaps I would say this—great speeches have come from Opposition Members in particular. My hon. Friend the Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew), the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) and the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) got to the heart and the nub of the critique of the Bill.

We have also heard many good speeches, including the last one, about issues of product safety and the need to have a system that can keep up. The speech that addressed both that issue and whether the Bill is appropriate—it was the outstanding speech by a Government Member—was made by the hon. Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner). He did not like my praise of his speech in so far as it disparaged in any way anybody else’s, but he faced up to the issues directly. He did not just say, “Well, there are these problems with products and product safety, and here’s a Bill that could do something about it.” He dealt with the fact that the Bill gives enormous power to Ministers. As colleagues across the House have pointed out, the purpose of this honourable House is to hold the Executive’s feet to the fire, hold them to account and hold them in check, and ensure that we champion the will of the people who sent us here. As has been said, not only the Minister but, back in 2018, the Secretary of State warned the House that

“the use of delegated powers carries a risk of abuse by the Executive”.––[Official Report, Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Public Bill Committee, 1 February 2018; c. 305.]

The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) is not here, so I will try to be more polite than I would have been if she was, but if Brexit derangement syndrome is a condition, it is one that affects not only people who are maniacally in favour of Brexit, but those who seem unable to think rationally from the other side. The point that I tried to make to the hon. Lady in an intervention—I would make it again—is that giving such untrammelled power to Ministers is frightening, regardless of whether we prefer closer alignment with the EU. She said that we need common-sense alignment, but these powers would allow a super-ideological future Minister to come in and seek, entirely for ideological reasons, to stop any alignment with the most sensible of EU regulations purely to have some Brexit difference. That makes no sense whatsoever.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I will press on a little, but I may come back to the hon. Lady.

I understand that, following the loveless landslide that brought the Government to power, the Government, and Government Members, have done an about-face. They now delight in more powers for the Executive, so much so that the Bill’s very first subsection gives the same Secretary of State I just referenced the power to make regulations anywhere in the UK, without consulting Parliaments in Westminster, Holyrood, Cardiff Bay or Stormont, on more or less anything he likes.

I was so pleased that the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim raised the devolution question. I was a Minister for eight years, and such is the complexity of the devolution settlement now that even with thousands of civil servants working on primary legislation, Ministers can come to the House and suddenly it gets pointed out to them that they are in breach of the Sewel convention and ignoring how Northern Ireland has a slightly different environmental or energy regulatory environment from Scotland or Wales. They find that the situation is more complex than they first thought. Now, we are giving powers to Ministers who will not have to go through any of that rigmarole. They will not get to find out how they are trampling on the devolution settlement, and that is a serious issue.

We on the Opposition Benches can make the arguments, but what we must really do is engage Government Members and get them to recognise that they are not here just to back the Government. They need to question these things, and not just ask whether the powers could be used for good. The hon. Member for Birmingham Northfield gave a brilliant speech with examples of the speeding up and pace of technological change—I think he spoke about the drones in Ukraine. Even though Opposition Members may maintain that the system that we had worked perfectly well, he made the case that perhaps we need something speedier going forward, and I can see that he made a strong argument. None the less, is the answer just to hand to Ministers, in this skeleton Bill, all the powers in the world? I suggest that it is not.

I know the Minister and the Secretary of State are decent people, and I hope that we will see, as the legislation proceeds through this House, ways to curb some of the powers while allowing us to have a regulatory system that can speedily respond to inappropriate products. None of us wants to see parliamentary pride getting in the way of an effective system; we have to find a way of making things work. This Bill, however, goes too far the other way. That is why the cross-party experts on the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee have looked at it and said that they do not feel that the case has been made to justify such massive powers.

Some parallels were raised by the hon. Member for Walthamstow, and I think it is fair enough to say, “Look at the way that Henry VIII powers and delegated powers were taken by the Government in the last Parliament.” Quite rightly, people questioned it, but that was about implementing Brexit; it really was something enormous that had to be done at a reasonable speed. Those of us involved were cognisant of the fact that we did not want it to set a precedent; we did not want Government to take the unique conditions of implementing Brexit and take it as a new way of governing. To the comment from the hon. Member for Erewash about rebuilding the world that the ancient Egyptians had, they were very good at centralising authority and I do not think that that is an entirely good thing. That is exactly what the Bill does, so I agree with him on that.

I am sure the Secretary of State is an excellent judge of things such as the safe operation of a laptop, say, for a trainee solicitor, but he will now have the power to regulate any product for sale in the UK on the basis of safety or functionality. The immense power given to him will allow him to decide what is and is not sold in the UK, without consulting this place and by merely providing a written statement. The Bill goes further, with Ministers acquiring the power to give inspectors the right to enter somebody’s home to seize any product that the Minister has decided, on the basis of non-compliance. That can be imposed on manufacturers, marketers, installers, importers or people who run an online marketplace, the definition of which, by the way, can be altered on a ministerial whim and at any point.

We have heard about dangerous and often unpopular electric bikes and scooters, but the powers in the Bill allow a future Secretary of State—we have had some eccentric ones in the past—to decide to ban bicycles because he considers them to be dangerous. He might look at the figures on that. After publishing a statement, he could instruct anyone he likes to enter the house of every bike owner and every bike shop to seize every bike in the United Kingdom. The Secretary of State could effectively end cycling in the UK without coming to Parliament. He could create legions of cycle inspectors who could enter people’s homes or businesses and seize their property before disposing of it. And the Government want to hide this act under the innocuous name of the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill. It is a massive power to give to the Secretary of State.

I say this to the many new Labour Members: I am not very keen on any Government, even the one of which I was a member. It was Lord Acton who said:

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Well, there is an element of absolute power in this Bill, but we have an opportunity both to recognise the powerful case made by the hon. Member for Birmingham Northfield for an appropriate system and by his colleagues talking about different challenges, and to make sure that we limit and reduce those powers as the Bill goes through the House. I know that my cycle example is a little extreme, but it is also true. It would not require the Government to return to this House; they would be able to do it.

The Prime Minister has told us that the No. 1 mission of this Government is growth, yet his Ministers, not satisfied with taking the fastest growing economy in the entire G7 and bringing it to a shuddering halt, have introduced what may be the most tediously named but potentially dangerous Bill in the history of Parliament. We can look at what the Government have done for business so far. They have ended the rate relief for hospitality, made part-time workers too expensive to hire, hiked the cost of employing people through next week’s jobs tax, strengthened the trade unions and made it impossible to fire new workers. I would not want to exaggerate this Bill’s role, but in a crowded field, it takes the biscuit in many ways. Businesses are struggling to cope with all these things already, and now we will have greater business uncertainty caused by the fact that Ministers can, on a whim, choose which products can and cannot be sold. This will provide the exact opposite of the certainty that Labour Members suggested the Bill could bring, in a way that has no logic behind it.