Planning Bill

My Lords, I am a Member of both the Delegated Powers Committee and the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee which, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, is in session. However, its chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, has accepted my apologies and encouraged me to speak in this debate. I defer to others on the matter of privilege, but some have not seen that this Commons-only proposal is a serious threat to the proper conduct of scrutiny in this House. Scrutiny is agreed on all sides to be one of the principal contributions that this House makes to the public good. Now that my noble friend Lord Jenkin has provided that regulations as to liability and amount, in Clauses 200 and 201, shall be excluded from his amendment, there can be no further reason to shortcut scrutiny. This is where the Merits Committee comes in—the committee that dealt with the Manchester casino and the home information packs. It reports weekly to your Lordships and has no equivalent in the other place. I hope and believe that it provides the right balance of information and advice to the House, yet the Government’s proposal puts it completely out of play. Nobody will have missed the proposal in subsections (2A) and (2B) of my noble friend’s amendment that, "““before approval by the House of Commons””," the power is there to, "““refer the regulations to any committee for a report””." That, of course, could put the Merits Committee back into play, with its duty to provide an even-handed commentary on controversial regulations. Is there now any justification for bypassing the Merits Committee? I cannot see that there is.