Baroness Janke (LD)

My Lords, the basic idea that the list of controlled drug precursor chemicals should be in sync across the UK and with international agreements that we have signed up to is a clear and reasonable one. More complicated is the process by which we have got here. It is also less straightforward whether the Home Office is applying the right lessons from the mistakes involved. The controlled drugs SI would give the Government the power to align the lists of drug precursor chemicals between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in future. Given the problems of delay that have brought us here today, with it taking five years since the end of the implementation period for this SI to come forward, can the Minister set out whether the department has set any targets or guidelines for how quickly it will move in future to use such powers? The Home Office has said that work on this SI started in 2024 and that this is one of its “legislative priorities”, yet we have the SI in Parliament only in 2026. Even if we start the clock after the 2024 general election, that is still the best part of two years to serve up an SI that was already delayed and running late. Is the Minister happy with that sort of turnaround time, and is anything being done to speed up the secondary legislation process in the Home Office? The criminal justice SI involves even longer delays and a failure to act for at least a decade to update domestic law in the light of international agreements, in an area—criminal justice—that has consistently been a priority of different Home Secretaries and Governments. It has been a decade full of tough rhetoric about crime and requests for new legislation from the Home Office, yet also one of failure to keep on top of what should be pretty basic administrative tasks: having a proper legislation log, handover notes and processes for staff, and keeping a list of drugs up to date. Yet we know that was not the case. The Minister and the Home Secretary can reasonably point out that they were not in post for most of that decade, and in correspondence with the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee the relevant Minister has set out remedial steps, which is welcome. What this leaves, though, are two concerns. First, there is the very basic nature of the mistakes: the absence of a proper legislation log and the absence of proper handover processes, particularly in a department where staff churn is a regular and even frequent occurrence. Over the years when these basic measures were missing, a variety of different staff would have churned through posts and in some way should have been aware of or responsible for such issues. That these problems persisted for so long suggests a systemic flaw in the management processes or quality in the department. Moreover, as the Home Office has, according to its correspondence with the SLSC, decided not to track down which staff were involved, it is quite possible that people who made mistakes did not know and still do not know, and need to learn from them. Those who have moved on to other roles may well be making the same mistakes elsewhere.