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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have not the good fortune to have been in this House for very long. I have had two sessions here. One, in 1999, was rather short, but I have been here from 2004 until today. I do not know a great deal about the procedure of this House, but that sounded extraordinarily like a Second Reading speech. Perhaps I am mistaken, but that is how it sounded to me. I will briefly offer a little comfort about impact assessments. This is, admittedly, a framework Bill, and there is a long list of bodies in Schedules 1 to 6. Whenever a Secretary of State wishes to put down an order to abolish, to change funding or to merge, he will have to produce an affirmative instrument. Affirmative instruments are subject to 12 weeks’ consultation and the provision of an impact assessment, unless there is a very good reason why there should not be an impact assessment. The idea that there will never be any impact assessments for this House to look at is not right. How will this House look at them? There is a committee called the Merits Committee, on which I was fortunate enough to serve for four years. That committee, as your Lordships know, looks carefully at every instrument. If it thinks that it is right to draw something to the attention of this House, it does so. If it thinks that the policy in the instrument is inconsistent with the Government’s declared policy, it says so. Then that affirmative instrument is debated. It has been said—and we shall come back to this—that there should be some enhanced procedure, allowing Parliament to debate the thing in more detail because, it is said, Parliament does not usually turn down affirmative instruments. Nevertheless, we have that power. I believe, if the noble Lord, Lord Warner, will forgive me, that to reiterate that there is no impact assessment is to misunderstand the way in which the Bill has been put together. If you believe that this Bill should not have been put together as it was and that we should do whatever will be done only by primary legislation, what you are saying is that we will do only half a dozen bodies a year, because that is about all we would ever get the parliamentary time for.