Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate and I have listened to most of it. I think that the Minister can take some encouragement from the fact that the policy intent of this measure is largely agreed. I do not think that anybody has gone full frontal in opposition to the policy intention of what the Government are trying to do. This is an important Bill and I draw encouragement from the fact that people are anxious to try to get the policy delivered. I hope that that holds, because the Bill has handling difficulties. As a former Whip, I can see that they are obvious in terms of what the Government have to try to get the House to agree to before Royal Assent.

The debate has demonstrated something else to me. It is that even when people agree with the policy intent, they all have their little lists of complaints about bodies that they want to protect. They say, “In principle, it’s really great; in practice, not in my backyard”. I have my little list as well. In 2007, I took part, as did the Minister, in the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill proceedings when we set up the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. It took office in 2008 but is now in Schedule 1, so its days are numbered. I have great doubts about this. I moved an amendment to create it as an executive agency, as opposed to a non-departmental public body. Now the logic, the Ministers and the Government have changed and suddenly it is coming back to the Department for Work and Pensions. I am absolutely convinced that, in spite of this being the right thing to do in principle, issues such as this need to be looked at carefully. The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission is likely to cost more and to lose its focus. It is also likely to be much more difficult to run the collection of arrears that are so important to so many families in the United Kingdom.

The policy intent is agreed. We will all have our complaints and we will all have our little lists. Therefore, the question of the time that will be needed to deal with this Bill adequately is going to be a difficulty for the House, even absent the questions of process, to which I will turn in a second.

My great and much missed friend, Sir Clement Freud, used to make a lot of money on “Just a Minute” because he would always win the competition—without hesitation, deviation or repetition—by falling back on lists. Any time that he wanted to waste time in order to win the competition, he always resorted to lists. This Bill is full of lists. Noble Lords will speak without hesitation or deviation, but I think that repetition is out of order. I look forward to trying to help the Government, even absent the procedural issues, to get the Bill through in good order and in reasonable time, but that is a big ask.

I have listened to this high-quality debate on an issue about which people have thought a lot. I give the Official Opposition credit for this not being opposition for the sake of opposition. There have been some pretty robust speeches from Her Majesty’s Opposition, but I do not get any sense that there is a full-frontal assault to bring the Bill down, which I welcome. However, there are two problems that the Government will have to solve if they are not to put this Bill at risk, which would be a shame.

First, I do not think that the statutory instrument procedure that we have at the moment is adequate. That is clear to me. It was encouraging that colleagues came up with some solutions that I had not thought of myself. We have had some from my noble friends Lord Eccles and Lord Norton, among others, which deserve further and better consideration in terms of making sure that the role of the House is properly and adequately catered for when these statutory instruments start flowing from the Bill. Something that my noble friend has to do—he has to do it this evening—is give people proper reassurance that that issue will be addressed. I am open to argument, but this evening he has to address the depth and the extent of the criticism that was levelled in that direction.

Secondly, Clause 11 and Schedule 7 are in the same category. My noble friend Lord Norton came up with a good idea, which I had not thought of, of having a public bodies Bill in every Parliament. We now have five-year Parliaments and in each you could have a sensible public bodies Bill, which would be related to specific organisations. They would know which they were and we would be able to get proper scrutiny of them as time went on. Over the term of the Parliament, and over a period of time, there would be a systematic way of dealing with these bodies that makes sense and gives this House a proper and serious role, as well as the ability to amend the proposals in front of us.

I recognise and acknowledge that Clause 11 is an attempt at transparency. However, another way of drafting Clause 11 and Schedule 7 would be just to take the general power that was necessary and to leave the list out. Indeed, the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, made a similar suggestion, which would get you to the same place. However, the Government took the view that the honest thing to do was to put the names that they had in mind in the Bill. That has had the unintended consequence of making matters worse and I hope that the Minister will recognise that it has been counterproductive. The Minister will have to satisfy the House on those two matters before we can attempt to judge whether or not the proposal for a Select Committee is worth pursuing.

Another question that the Bill will need to address in the fullness of time is that, because of the way in which it is drafted, new functions are capable of being created in the process of some of the changes that the Bill envisages. I hope that I am wrong about that, but there should be provisions in the Bill to ensure that it cannot happen. Such a reassurance is also important.

I say to my noble friend that the Bill is very important for a series of reasons and it is essential that we give it the best shot possible in trying to get it through the procedures of the House. He will facilitate that process if he can give reassurance on the two issues that I have mentioned: Schedule 7 and the process for dealing with statutory instruments. If he can do that, he might carry the House; if he does not, he will have difficulty in doing so this evening. That would be a great shame, because it would prejudice the future progress of the Bill.