Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)

My Lords, given the time constraints, I will not reiterate some of the wider constitutional issues that have already been raised. But first I have a question: why is the SI even needed? By Defra’s own admission, the current regulations are fully complied with by everybody in the industry. That admission has been highlighted by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. It does not even get a mention in the Explanatory Memorandum, no matter how opaque it is—indeed, it was criticised by the committee for its omission. I want to concentrate in particular on consultation, or the lack thereof. It seems to be part of a wider pattern on these SIs, on which no consultation takes place. There are two conclusions that one can draw in relation to that. First, there is an approach that is both arrogant and ignorant. Indeed, one of the rationales given by the Government in the Explanatory Memorandum for a lack of consultation is that impacted stakeholders and businesses “have had many opportunities to feed into the development of the EU regulations through various formal EU consultations”. So the expectation is, if you are a small business, that you are supposed both to be aware of what is coming down the pipeline from the EU and to feed in and make your representations directly to the EU. The Government appear to be completely washing their hands of that. We have seen that ignorance on previous occasions whenever, for example, legislation was put through on seed potatoes. I know one particular example of the impact of that where a business would have gone out of business because it was not able to source, even from another source. It took a considerable amount of work with the then Agriculture Minister in Northern Ireland to find a technical solution to enable it to remain in business. That was because the legislation was simply imposed with an ignorance to the direct impact on the individual. The second reason why consultation clearly has not taken place is because, effectively, this is a fait accompli. In many ways, it does not matter, on the substance of this, whether stakeholders would say, “Fair enough, we think this is perfectly fine”, or whether they would be utterly up in arms. In either case, the Government are in the position where they are simply allowing it to be imposed. It does not matter what reaction there is in a consultation, so why go through a consultation in the first place? That, I suggest, is no way to do laws in this country—to impose them on people. It suggests, whether it is with this Government with the reset or a future Government with a very different reset, that simply banking the current status quo and building on it is not acceptable. That is the wider lesson that we need to draw from this SI.