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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I do not think this is a very good idea. It is an unusual idea altogether. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, clearly has a notion that the plan should be discussed in both Houses. While I, like him, am all in favour of calling the Government to account and criticising them when things go wrong, I am definitely not in favour of trying to second-guess the government machine. If we were to accept this amendment, where would it all end? Would we expect Parliament to have sight of and comment on the operational plans of, say, the Army in Afghanistan and Iraq? Would we expect Parliament to discuss the day-to-day administration of the passport office or the Immigration Service? I doubt that very much. As the Grand Committee knows, the Government have gone a long way in revealing their plans for the current CSA in the Green Papers, the White Papers, the Statements in Parliament, and so on. They, in part at least, have resulted in the Bill. CMEC will, as I am sure the Minister will confirm, have its own operational plan and will publish the annual report. We will be discussing amendments a little later on as to what should go in the annual report, when it should be published, and so on. Once the annual report is published, there is nothing to stop any Member of Parliament debating it. That is absolutely as it should be. In passing, I have to confess a to fair degree of angst regarding the media, who do not seem to understand, or perhaps do not want to, that Parliament consists of two Houses, and that your Lordships, as well as Members of another place, are Members of Parliament. Furthermore, if your Lordships are sitting, say, on a Friday and the other place is not, then Parliament is sitting. Have your Lordships, who are about to debate a Private Member’s Bill or whatever, woken up on a Friday morning to be told by the ““Today”” programme that Parliament is not sitting today? I do not know about other Members of the Committee, but it makes me choke on my cereal and at moments almost drown in my bath. Having got that off my chest, the amendment says that the operational plan is to be abandoned if a Motion has—and this is curious wording—not been made within three months of this being published by the Secretary of State. I suppose that means laid and debated, but what happens if it has not? Presumably it becomes null and void and the plan comes to a grinding halt. I fail to understand how any of that is going to help in a stressful situation for the agency. To my mind it is, again, overkill. If the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, wants to be more definite about what goes into the annual report, we can discuss that and I shall listen to him with interest, but for now I am content to leave things as they are. However, that being said, the noble Lord raises a fair point in Amendment No. 210. We are anxious that too much is decided by statutory instrument. Her Majesty's Government employ the tactic of writing little into the Bill and what they write is, typically, vague. This means that passing a Bill through Parliament becomes easier and faster to do because there is so little to scrutinise. The skeleton of the Bill is then fleshed out by civil servants into regulation, which we then debate. I stand behind the amendment because it makes the Government’s evasion of the parliamentary process a little more complicated. Moreover, with there being a staggering 16 new regulations created every day in this country and our regulatory system becoming more and more hideously complex and bureaucratic, surely we should attempt to limit any pointless or needless regulations being implemented by insisting on a consultation process. Talking to all persons with a relevant interest will only help to ensure that CMEC works in a more sympathetic and effective manner. CMEC will find its inauguration into the benefits infrastructure far easier if it is seen to be communicating rather than instructing. So, half a mark, perhaps.