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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

moved Amendment No. 20: Page 2, line 18, leave out paragraphs (a) to (c) and insert- ““(a) provision abolishing, conferring or transferring, or providing for the delegation of, functions of any description, (b) provision creating or abolishing a body or office,”” The noble Lord said: This is a complex group of amendments, including both government and opposition amendments. For that reason, I think that I had best address our amendments and then work at some pace through the others in the group. Amendments Nos. 65 and 66 and 68 and 69 concern the power to confer legislative functions by order. The ability to confer the function of legislating is important so that orders can be more easily designed to deliver large-scale reforms to entire regimes. A function of legislating, as the Bill specifies, means to legislate by order, rules, regulations or other subordinate instrument. Bills of an equivalent size often include powers to make secondary legislation, since it is usually not appropriate or necessary for all the detail of a statutory regime to be set out in primary legislation, or because some aspects of a statutory regime may need subsequent amending or updating. We welcome the conclusions of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which stated that including in the Bill a power to confer legislative functions by order to Ministers and other suitable bodies is not inappropriate. The committee evidently has a lot of expertise in this area and we are very grateful for its support. Amendment No. 65 restricts the persons or bodies eligible for such powers to three categories. The first is Ministers—the category of persons most likely to be given powers to legislate as part of future orders. The second category is persons or bodies who have functions under an enactment. That will ensure that powers to legislate will be conferred only on persons or bodies already recognised by Parliament as suitable. The third category is a body, or the holder of an office, which has been created by the order itself. That power will be useful, for example, in the case of mergers, where the successful transfer of function may necessitate the creation of a new body. A minor amendment, Amendment No. 66, has been proposed by the Government to further clarify the parliamentary procedures that must apply to the exercise of legislative powers conferred on Ministers. We hope that that minor power will be seen as useful and valuable. We have also sought under Amendment No. 65 to respond to concerns surrounding the ability of bodies or officers who have been given legislative power by order further to delegate those powers to others. Evidently, that would be an inappropriate use of the power in the Bill and is something that the Government want to protect against. I have already stated that the Government's view is that it would not be possible further to delegate legislative powers conferred by order under the Bill; an express provision in the Bill would be needed in order to allow that. However, to put the issue beyond doubt, Amendment No. 65 explicitly prevents powers to legislate conferred by order being further delegated to someone else. The purpose of government Amendments Nos. 20 and 36 to 38 is to make clearer the types of provision that it is possible to make under Clauses 1 and 2. In general, they are drafting improvements which are not intended to change the scope of those powers. Amendment No. 20 re-organises and makes minor changes to some of the provisions in Clause 1(7) and in doing so makes it clearer that orders made under Clause 1 may contain provision abolishing, conferring, or providing for the delegation of functions of any description, and that they may create new bodies or offices. Amendments Nos. 36 to 38 similarly improve Clause 2 to make it clearer what can and cannot be done under the power. In particular, the amendments make it explicit that an order under Clause 2 cannot create or abolish any new regulatory function. Clause 2 is about affecting the way in which regulatory functions are exercised, and not about changing those functions. The amendments clarify that it will be possible to create or abolish bodies only in the context of transferring regulatory functions to new bodies, and only then for the purpose of furthering the principles of better regulation set out in subsection (3). Amendments Nos. 68, 69, 86, 87 and 90 introduce minor drafting changes or consequential amendments to Clauses 5 and 15, and are considered necessary for the purposes of clarity. Amendment No. 68, for example, is purely consequential on Clause 5, which now contains an extra subsection. Amendment No. 69 simply moves the definition of ““a function of legislating”” from its previous position in Clause 22, as it is better placed in Clause 5. Amendment No. 90 ensures that this definition also applies to Clause 15. For these reasons, I commend the amendments to the House. I would rather address the other amendments in the group when I have heard the range of arguments from noble Lords opposite. I think that will probably be more helpful to your Lordships’ House. I beg to move.