Environmental Noise (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2009

My Lords, I congratulate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, on initiating this short debate. It is extremely important that this matter is discussed on the Floor of the House and that the issues involved are put on record. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Taylor; I am not sure how many of us had ever heard of ambulatory references before this came up or, in the case of some of us, before we started to research for this little debate two or three days ago. As always, at the end of the week, I will go home, and they will ask, "What have you been up to down there?". I will say, "We’ve been causing the Government grief". They will say, "Great! What about?". I will say, "Ambulatory references", and they will look at me as though I am mad. However, joking apart, this is an important matter because it is about the right of Parliament, and this House in particular, properly to scrutinise legislation that derives from European directives. The Merits Committee has done the House a service in looking into this matter, identifying it and raising it, as has the European Committee. We should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and my noble friend Lady Maddock for taking it up directly with Defra Ministers on behalf of those committees and pursuing it so actively. I do not want to add anything very much to what the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has already said about the real issue. His explanation was admirable in making a difficult, technical and quite obscure issue very clear. I thank him for that. The important matter is how far these ambulatory references—which mean that once a European directive and the amendments have been agreed, it goes straight into English law rather than having to come through as a statutory instrument—can be properly scrutinised. The noble Lord set that out admirably. I read all the correspondence from Defra Ministers, but I did not understand half of it. I came to the view, which I always come to, perhaps slightly arrogantly, that if I cannot understand it, some of it must be gobbledegook. I suspect that gobbledegook is the wrong word, but the arguments that have been put forward and are set out in the two reports from the Merits Committee are a little obtuse, to put it mildly. When I come across the word "expediency", I am always a bit dubious, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, knows from our discussions on the marine Bill. The word "expediency" seems to be an excuse for bureaucrats to put things through without going through proper procedures, due process or proper scrutiny. That appears to have been the situation in this case. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, widened the discussion to cover the substantive issues in these regulations. I wondered whether we should do that today and came to the view that we should not, although they raise a number of interesting issues about how this directive has been transposed and how it will be carried out. Some of us will certainly want to look at this as time goes on to see what happens because it seems to have all the hallmarks of a system that might be quite expensive and bureaucratic and result in very little in practice. However, that is for another day. Today, we should say the fact that we are having this debate and that Jim Fitzpatrick, the Minister of State at Defra, has agreed that the regulations should be amended to remove the part of the ambulatory reference that we find offensive is a victory for the scrutiny system of this House. I do not think that we should think that we should not stand up and say that. In particular, this is a vindication, yet again, of the setting up of the Merits Committee, which is one of the greatest procedural things to have happened while I have been a Member of this House. Jim Fitzpatrick’s letter promises amending regulations. He writes: ""having considered the Committee's concerns as set out in its Report, in this particular case the Department is now persuaded that it would be preferable to limit the ambit of the ambulatory reference to the technical aspects in the Annexes to the Directive. We propose to amend the Regulations so as to limit the ambit of the ambulatory reference to technical matters contained in the Annexes to the Directive"." I do not think those amending regulations have yet been published. One further question to the excellent questions that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, posed is: when can we expect that the amending regulations will be published?