Brexit: Article 50

Lord Cunningham of Felling Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Cunningham of Felling (Lab)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)]

It is the turn of the Conservative Benches and then we shall hear from the Labour Benches.

[Lord Callanan]

I remind the noble Lord that as well as getting the meaningful vote passed by Parliament we need to legislate for it. Clearly, that is quite a challenging programme, but we will attempt it. The most important thing is to keep putting forward relentlessly the argument that the best way to avoid no deal is to vote for a deal.

[Lord Cunningham of Felling]

My Lords, since the Minister mentioned scrutiny, does he think that for departments to submit compendium statutory instruments covering multiple subjects replete with errors—in one case, a fatal error was referred back to the department and the department then said that it intended to withdraw the instrument but has not done so—expedites scrutiny?

[Lord Callanan]

It is difficult to comment on that specific example without seeing it. I hope that departments want to work with the noble Lord’s committee to make sure that the quality of statutory instruments is appropriate and that the appropriate scrutiny is applied to them. It sounds from what he says as though the appropriate scrutiny is being applied.