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Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee: Secondary Legislation

My Lords, it is with great pleasure that I take part in this debate, although I do not plan to speak for long. I shall refer to the report, but I hope that the House will forgive me if I indulge in a little nostalgia. Having worked here in my party’s Whips’ Office since 1977, I have watched with some alarm the growth in the importance of legislation by statutory instrument. It was not the volume of statutory instruments that caused that alarm, but the fact that much secondary legislation was being created about matters that some Peers believed should more properly be contained in primary legislation and, particularly, that those matters should be amendable by Parliament. A few voices crying in the wilderness drew attention to that unsatisfactory state of affairs. One was that of my noble friend Lord Hooson, whose speech on 19 December 1984, in a debate about the parliamentary role of the House of Lords, was strangely familiar when I looked it up the other day. I shall quote one sentence, which I believe I may have written. He stated: "““It seems to me that the scope and quality of powers reserved to Ministers in vital Bills for changing the state of things by means of statutory instruments indicates a fairly determined effort to bypass effective parliamentary scrutiny, particularly in your Lordships' House””.—[Official Report, 19/12/84; col. 661.]" Much water has flowed under the bridge since those days. In 1992, the Jellicoe committee recommended the establishment of the Delegated Powers Scrutiny Committee to examine whether the Government were using delegated legislation appropriately in new Bills. Since 2003, that committee’s successor, the equally powerful Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, has been joined by the Merits Committee, which I am very pleased to be joining this Session. I found the report that we are debating tobe a model of lucidity. Its recommendations are constructive, although I do not believe that they will all be acted on with the alacrity and enthusiasm that the committee would perhaps like. The need for action was borne out by much of the evidence. Like my noble friend Lord Methuen, I was struck by the written evidence of Mrs Linda Weeks, the learning support centre manager at Kent Police College. She provides monthly updates on new legislation that she obtains from Parliament and from other sources, but states that she would very much like more notice of instruments coming into force, particularly as the press often know about these things in advance. I wonder how on Earth police officers keep track of these things when they suddenly find out via the press that they have new powers as from that very day. Mrs Weeks went on to say that there could often be confusion when parts of Acts come into force—sometimes only part of a subsection. She wrote tellingly of all the various criminal justice Acts—for example, those of 1972, 1982, 1988 and 1991, all of which have parts in force and parts not in force. I repeat my noble friend’s astonishment that part of an old Act might suddenly be brought into effect in21 days’ time. Her evidence makes the case for the report’s recommendation that annual statutory instrument plans by government departments should be compiled and published to give valuable long-range warning to those affected. The other matter that I was pleased to read about in the report was the emphasis on clear Explanatory Memoranda. Many is the time that I have looked to those for enlightenment, only to be completely daunted by complicated cross-referencing and minimal explanation that give absolutely nothing away as to the meaning of the instrument. I fervently endorse the committee’s recommendation that statutory instruments and their Explanatory Memoranda in particular should be subjected to review by a senior official—although a junior official might better mirror the general public—who is, "““sufficiently detached from the subject in question to be able to assess its intelligibility to the layman reader””." Finally, I pay tribute to all those Peers who have in the past 30 years to my knowledge flagged up the importance of the proper scrutiny of secondary legislation, and particularly to those no longer with us, including Lord Rippon and Lord Simon of Glaisdale and, from these Benches, the much missed Earl Russell. I am very honoured to have a place on this important committee.