Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)

My Lords, as well as moving my Amendment 37, I will speak to my further amendments in this group, Amendments 38 and 123. In the letter which she kindly sent to the Committee earlier today, the Minister displayed her familiarity with and affinity for Erskine May and, even if I did not have unbridled delight as to the contents of the letter, I was pleased to see this reference to one of our great constitutional experts and authorities on legislative procedure. In that spirit, I would like to quote another revered expert on constitution matters, the great AV Dicey, who expounded that: “The principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament … has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”. In more recent times, the Constitution Unit at University College London has set out particularly relevant arguments for the importance of parliamentary accountability. In its 2023 briefing Parliamentary Scrutiny: What is it and why does it matter? the unit rightly said that: “Government accountability to parliament is central to our democratic system”. I think this all demonstrates that the right of Parliament to oversee and hold public bodies to account must be upheld dearly as well. This new regulator, which we are bringing about through this Bill, will at the start of its existence have recourse to public funds. It is crucial that any body which has funding streams derived from the taxpayer at any point should be accountable to and scrutinised by Parliament. That is what Amendment 123 requires. Amendment 37 seeks to ensure that any person who is appointed to the board of the regulator must be approved by a parliamentary committee, and Amendment 38 requires the chief executive to appear before a parliamentary committee at least once a year if they have been so invited. This ensures that anyone who is going to be holding any formal position in this new regulator can be scrutinised by parliamentarians before they can be appointed. Following on from the debates in the two groups that we have just had about conflicts of interest, it may be that rather than setting it out in the Bill, as the probing amendments sought to do, the parliamentary oversight that we could bring about this way might be able to give us the reassurances we seek that the people who are given these awesome new responsibilities are doing so without conflicts of interest or the pressures on them that we wish to resist. I beg to move.