Contribution
My Lords, I thank noble Lords, who have spoken so well in this debate and are generally supportive—although perhaps not in all the detail that I would like. I congratulate the Minister on her response at the Dispatch Box, which was been extremely interesting and well said.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, referred to the anachronistic rules that we have at present, which he said smacked of an earlier era. The Minister went further, saying that it has been a running sore since 1539. It might be time to apply a patch or two to that particular running sore. I have not attempted to revise the whole of the statutory instrument procedure. It is a big task. I did not look at the negative resolutions at all. “One step enough for me” is a familiar phrase. This is a first step, which I commend to the Government, in their early days.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for her contribution and her good wishes, but she rather forgot the role of this House, which is as a revising Chamber. That is why we are here, to ask the Commons to think again—or the Minister, when they effectively are making the law, as happens with statutory instruments. That is what we are here for. There is no point in coming here otherwise. The suggestion that my Bill attacks the primacy of the Commons misunderstands what I am trying to do. This House should send a message to the Commons to think again. If the Commons says, “We are not interested; we will not think again”, then that is it. The Bill then comes back to this House and we either approve it or disapprove it. When the Statutory Instruments Act was passed in 1946, in the early days of the Attlee Government, that was thought of as a check on legislation. It has been used about seven times in the history of statutory instruments. Consequently, it is no longer an effective check. Regret Motions are useless. Many people do not bother to vote or come to listen to proceedings where regret Motions are involved.
I am not attacking the primacy of the Commons. I am saying, “Think again”, and that if the Commons says, “Get lost”, well, that is it. Similarly, if a Minister is presented on the other hand with reasoned concerns from this House, such as that there has been no consultation and no impact assessment, and has the same message from the House of Commons, he may very well think that he should withdraw the instrument which has been put forward and not pursue it in that form.
We are a long way from Henry VIII, but he increasingly holds sway. I refer to the new Bill concerned with standards that is going through. It is a bad Bill. What does it mean? It brings about bad government. The Government have been going for two or three months and they are producing—I say this with the greatest respect—bad law. It is the absolute epitome of a Bill which hangs secondary legislative powers from its branches. No doubt it will proceed in due course through all stages in this House, but the Government should expect to hear disappointment from those of us who hoped there would be a change from the addictions of the past—addictions to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, referred.
The noble and learned Lord pressed the point that primary legislation is required to deal with this problem. The Hansard Society said, in relation to this Bill, that it would prefer the introduction of a conditional amendment procedure to be through an amendment to Standing Orders—great. The reason that I am looking for primary legislation is that, as the joint reports of the committees to which I referred earlier stated, the issue is not the primacy of the Commons but the balance between Parliament and the Executive Government—the elective dictatorship to which my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire referred. An editorial in today’s Guardian, “Modernising Parliament: Time for Creative Changes”, suggested that:
“Parliament can sometimes come across as an alien irrelevance, in which politicians spout platitudes offering little hope to stressed lives.”
The 2015 debate regarding tax credits for 3 million people is an excellent example, where the Government paid no heed at all to the decision of this House that they should think again, despite the fact that they were dealing with so many millions of people and so much money. I have no confidence at all that any Government would be motivated to modify Standing Orders in favour of Parliament. Parliament must fight its own corner, by the use of its legislative powers, and this Bill is where it starts.