Contribution
My Lords, in moving Amendment 68, I will also speak to Amendments 72 and 73, all of which are much shorter than my previous amendment, which was just dispatched with.
The amendments in this group, which my noble friend Lord Markham has signed as well, are intended to prevent the financial assistance provisions in Clause 25 of the Bill becoming a blank cheque that successive Governments could fill out as they see fit. To do this, our amendments require that, before the appropriate national authority grants financial assistance in connection with a sporting event, the appropriate legislature must approve that assistance by resolution. This means in practice that, if the Secretary of State wants to help fund a particular event, the House of Commons must agree to any financial commitment. When the appropriate national authority is the Scottish Ministers, the Scottish Parliament must approve the funding, and where it is a Northern Ireland department, the Northern Ireland Assembly must give its consent.
It is a long-established principle that financial measures must be subject to approval by Parliament. Erskine May says in paragraph 33.2 that the “basic constitutional principle” of financial procedure is that
“the Crown requests money, the Commons grant it, and the Lords assent to the grant”.
It continues:
“In more modern terms, the Government presents to the House of Commons its detailed requirements for the financing of the public services; it is for the Commons, acting on the sole initiative of Ministers … to authorise the relevant expenditure”.
That is the crucial point: the Government must come to Parliament, specifically another place, with proposals for the sums to be spent on each object of expenditure, and those must be detailed requirements.
Of course, there are many Bills presented to Parliament which grant the Crown a more open-ended authorisation of expenditure, but, when those Bills are considered, Members of both Houses usually pass them knowing the object of the expenditure for which they are authorising, and the sums they are authorising. The impact assessment or a briefing or explanatory note from the Government would contain the Government’s estimate of how much the measures in that Bill would be likely to cost the public purse.
The Bill before us is not a usual piece of legislation, in the sense that it seeks to create a framework for future sporting events. We do not know to exactly which events the Bill will be applied in future, nor how much financial assistance the Government of the day might wish to grant those events. Clause 25 is an open-ended financial commitment, which potentially spans many decades into the future.
It is possible, without necessarily even looking many decades into the future, to envisage a Prime Minister who is fiscally less disciplined than others. I want to make sure that we are future-proofing the Bill for all eventualities.
Of course, the Bill is not accompanied by a detailed assessment of how much money the Government propose to spend as a result of Clause 25. That is not surprising. In fact, it is perfectly understandable. The very nature of an open-ended framework Bill such as this means that it is unknowable. But, if the Government are not able to tell us how much the Bill will cost in the long term, it is not just reasonable but a clear requirement to ensure that legislative consent is required for each instance of financial assistance granted under it. That will help us to ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny of each measure and, I hope, guarantee that fiscal probity is baked into the legislation.
All that our amendments seek to do is apply a very sound constitutional principle that the appropriation of public money should be agreed to by the House of Commons, elected by the people. I hope that the Minister and other noble Lords will agree. I beg to move.