Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

Amendment No. 338 moves into a highly complex and technical area and it will be helpful for me to write to her to cover some of the detailed points that she has raised. As the noble Baroness says, the amendment removes from the scope of Part 8 agreements those bodies which have an existing requirement to give their consent to the exercise of a particular function. It is a rather technical point that the inclusion of this section is important for the operation of the Bill—it is a clarification of the law specifically making it clear that bodies with a statutory requirement to give consent to the exercise by another of the function can still carry out the function themselves under Part 8 agreement. It begins to have a sort of party of the first part of the first part about it, which reminds me of some very old films. An existing example—and this may help the noble Baroness because she sought one—can be found in Section 10(3)(b) of the Conservation of Seals Act 1970 where the Secretary of State may only grant certain types of licence once it has received the consent of English Nature in England and the Countryside Council for Wales. It is slightly tortuous. The purpose of this provision is simply to clarify that a receiving body is not prevented from exercising the statutory function merely because it has an existing specialist involvement in the licensing process. In this case a future example might therefore be where there might be a desire on the part of Secretary of State to ask Natural England to carry out certain licensing operations under the seals Act. Natural England would already have to give its consent to the exercise of the function by the Secretary of State that this provision in Clause 76 would then make it clear that this should not prevent Natural England from carrying out the licensing role on behalf of the Secretary of State. In such a hypothetical circumstance, there would be no conflict of interest in allowing a specialist conservation body to carry out such a licensing function. Amendment No. 339 seeks to remove the power to pay a body for the performance of a function under Part 8. The power to pay a designated body for such services is an important provision without which it would not be possible to make effective use of flexible agreements. The body carrying out the function will clearly need a source of funding to meet its expenses in the extra work that it undertakes to perform. That will normally be provided by the owner of the function under the terms of the Part 8 agreement. The provision in Clause 76(3) does not provide powers for a body carrying out a function to fix fees or charges that would fall on a third party. Under Clause 74(2)(d), such a power is specifically made a ““reserved function”” and is therefore not capable of being delegated under a Part 8 agreement except as prescribed by an order made by the Secretary of State by means of a statutory instrument. Perhaps the noble Baroness will understand why I said that it may be necessary for me to follow this up between now and the next stage of the Bill. Should she require further information, I would be happy to provide it.