Lord Fox (LD)

My Lords, I am looking forward to the novelty of my noble friend Lord Foster listening to me. I will explain how Amendment 9, in my name, supports Amendment 7, in the names of my noble friend Lord Foster, the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, and me. At the heart of both amendments is the desire to ensure that there has been sufficient scrutiny of the regulations that are designed to make products safe; I use that word advisedly, in support of the noble Lord Lansley, because “safe” is a good word to find in there somewhere, and I hope that through these discussions we will find a way. In my experience, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is relatively tenacious, so I suspect that something may emerge. We need a process that takes into consideration all high-risk and higher-risk products. Lithium-ion batteries are a stark and horrific example when they go wrong, as set out eloquently by my noble friend, but there are other products, some of which we do not yet know about. Legislation has to be broad enough to be able to take those into consideration. Amendment 9 also addresses the important elements of parliamentary scrutiny that we discussed in the last group. We have heard the concerns. If applied properly, this will go a long way towards ameliorating many of them. If we get it working properly, it will provide greater genuine scrutiny than the affirmative process tends to do, because it will edit secondary legislation before it is laid—in other words, it will have gone through a process. Amendment 61, tabled by the Minister and signed by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, undertakes that the Secretary of State will consult when the Secretary of State thinks it is appropriate. My Amendment 9 seeks to move this on to a more structured footing. It causes the Secretary of State to issue a statement that sets out the consultation process that the Secretary of State must undertake before tabling secondary legislation. In some trivial cases, that will not be much consultation, but in other cases a great deal of work could be required, such as for an entirely new product, an entirely new use of an old product, or the reregulation of something that has proved problematic. All these would need to be addressed and assessed, to decide what level of risk we are dealing with. Higher-risk products would need a greater scrutiny process in order to reduce and mitigate risk, and make them as safe as possible. As a result of this amendment, the Secretary of State would have to notify Parliament of the process for the identification and assessment of risks in products. I thank the Minister and his team again for the discussions we have had on this. We have had a number of meetings and each time we have moved forward in this process; together, we have been able to get to something that can work. I am happy that, rather than enshrining a particular technology in primary legislation, we are putting in place a process, and one that can evolve, if it needs to, going forward. I hope that the Minister will set out further details of how this process will work and what the statement will include. I hope that he will take into consideration the concerns that have been demonstrated by my noble friends Lady Brinton and Lord Foster, as well as many other noble Lords during Committee. I should say, as an aside, that I was pleased to see the code of conduct, which is another brick in the wall, but this is the process by which that puts people’s noses to the grindstone and starts to apply it.