Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

I am grateful for the comments that have been made and I understand the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s concerns. I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me if I say that the Government came into office in July 2024 and, as soon as we identified the challenges posed in terms of orders not having been implemented previously, we took action to try to bring this back into some sort of order. There have been, self-evidently, challenges in relation to a number of issues. I cannot ultimately comment on what happened under previous Governments, but I can confirm that we took action on this issue as soon as it was identified. I can also confirm to the noble Baroness that officials have reviewed electronic records to seek to understand why the Act was not updated earlier. Those records did not indicate the reason for these omissions. That is a fault that we are looking to review. It may be that, since the UN controlled no DPCs between 2000 and 2014, awareness of the need to update the Act when it started doing so was lost within the department. To help mitigate against that in future, we have now created a log of drugs legislation to ensure this does not happen again. Through the order we are debating today, we are trying to put those omissions right. As the Minister for Policing and Crime set out in her letter to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee on 23 March, the Government understand the committee’s concerns about record-keeping, which has likely contributed to the delay in including the 12 DPCs and the 16 other elements in the Criminal Justice (International Co-operation) Act 1990. As a result, as I have said, drugs legislation logs have been created. The Government consider that the gap in knowledge is unlikely to have had wider implications across the Home Office, but I can assure noble Lords that the Minister for Policing and Crime has raised this issue with the Permanent Secretary. She has asked him to ascertain what Home Office legislation is dependent on or affected by international obligations and how we monitor those international obligations to ensure that any changes are reflected in UK law. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, I know that charging and the authorisation of fees being paid was an important issue. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee looked at the issue of plans for fees which were previously charged. I am happy to confirm today that we will be offering refunds to those who have been affected. The total sum is only around £3,000, but it is still an important issue. We will be looking at how we can manage that in due course and I will certainly be examining that with my colleagues in future. We are where we are. The Government have tried to make some changes with both these instruments brought forward today to ensure that there is a United Kingdom approach and those regulations are now in order. I commend both to the House. Motion agreed.