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Pre-legislative Scrutiny

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Goodlad on bringing his report to your Lordships' House and on explaining it with his customary incisiveness. Generally speaking, pre-legislative scrutiny is a desirable constitutional development. The members of a scrutiny committee have a real opportunity to influence the Government’s thinking. Moreover, the existence of the committee, sitting in public, animates and engages outside interests and individuals who have preoccupations about one or more of the draft Bill’s provisions. By the time it becomes a Bill, and begins its journey through the legislature, many more people than would otherwise be the case have become familiar with its contents and the issues to which it gives rise. This increased awareness goes a little way to redress the balance of power between Parliament and the Executive. Faced with a better informed House, the Government will usually have to work harder to achieve the passage of a Bill, and to give more ground than they would otherwise have done. Soon after the right honourable gentleman the Prime Minister became Prime Minister, he committed himself to changing the balance of power between Parliament and the Executive. Indeed, there is a draft Bill on constitutional renewal presently under consideration by a joint legislative committee—as we have heard more than once tonight—much of the contents of which purport to contribute to achieving this constitutional objective. However, as my noble friends Lord Goodlad and Lord Norton of Louth powerfully said, in the arena of pre-legislative scrutiny there seems little or no sign of the Government pursuing the Prime Minister’s declared aim. This is evident from the Government’s response to your Lordships’ Select Committee’s report. It is resoundingly negative. The Government refused the committee’s request to give a, "““general undertaking to publish most bills in draft or regularly to achieve the figures reached in 2003-04””." Yet the Government’s legislative plans for the coming session were published in May. Surely there could be greater use of pre-legislative scrutiny within this timescale, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, emphasised. Chapter 1 of the Government’s 2008 draft legislative programme states that its aim is, "““to set out the Government’s current proposals for legislation, to be considered by Parliament in its next session, for comment and consultation before the final programme is published in the Queen’s Speech towards the end of the year””." Given this aim, why are the Government so reluctant to let Parliament conduct detailed pre-legislative scrutiny of their proposed measures? Moreover, the Government were unwilling to give the committee any comfort on its specific requests, as my noble friend Lord Goodlad explained. They declined to provide guidance on the compiling and publishing of statistics for draft Bills and draft clauses; were not prepared to furnish a general undertaking to publish most Bills in draft form; and refused to agree to guarantee that a committee engaged in pre-legislative scrutiny should have at least three months at its disposal. The Minister will no doubt tell us, on the one hand, that the Government remain committed to the principle of pre-legislative scrutiny for most Bills; but, on the other, that constraints such as the availability of parliamentary draftsmen, competing demands on civil servants within departments and, quite simply, events, make specific commitments on numbers or timing impossible to make. My response to that is to say that, despite these constraints, Government always respect the legislative timetable and procedures of each of the two Houses of Parliament with respect to the passage of Bills in circumstances where the above-mentioned constraints are just as relevant. Why should pre-legislative scrutiny not be regarded in most cases—as I believe all speakers said this evening—as an additional mandatory stage in the passage of a Bill?