Pharmacy Order 2010

My Lords, having sat on the Bench on which the noble Baroness is now sitting, I know that it is infused with a reflex which all government Ministers have to Motions of this sort, which is to resist them. In some way they clip a feather on the end of the wing of government. I hope she will resist the reflex, or at least when she is not in her place tomorrow, she will read the sage and powerful words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott of Foscote. To me he has made an unanswerable case against this regulation, but he merely wishes to express regret rather than opposition, which I would have gone further and done. I will not repeat any of those arguments, but would ask her to take them on board. I shall be exceedingly brief because I sympathise with all the noble Lords now on the Front Benches in the Chamber. They have been in their places for much longer than me and I do not think that they have had their supper yet, and therefore perhaps will not be as alert as one might otherwise expect. I merely want to pick up on the point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Mayhew, and that is the point of principle. We should remind ourselves from time to time what Parliament is for. It was set up to protect the citizen from the Crown, and as the Crown has proliferated, it has the function of protecting the citizen from the overmighty subject. The corporate subject is now overmighty in many cases. In this case, the corporate subject—the inspectorate—has been given powers that are not commensurate with what are needed. That has been quite clearly stated and convincingly, conclusively stated by all my noble friends on the Back Benches. If the Government accept that it is a matter of principle that before anybody can intrude on a person’s premises they should have the authority of law, we should have been reassured by what the noble Lord, Lord Brett, the Minister’s colleague, said a fortnight ago last Friday when replying to the debate on the Bill proposed by my noble friend Lord Selsdon. On the concern that everybody had and which he shared about the control of powers of entry, he said: ""However"—" and this was intended to be reassuring— ""as noble Lords are aware, each individual power of entry is subject to parliamentary scrutiny. Any proposed new power of entry contained in a Bill or draft statutory instrument must complete the relevant parliamentary process".—[Official Report, 15/1/10; col. 733.]" That is exactly what we are doing now, and we are going to let it through. We are not reassured by that but deeply unhappy, and I am even more unhappy with the vast phalanxes of inspectors of different organisations with similar and similarly uncontrolled powers that appear to exist. I hope that in the next Parliament this is a wrong that will be redressed.