I have now been in the Chamber for seven hours, apart from a brief sojourn to serve on a Statutory Instrument Committee related to fish taxes in Scotland, which feels completely apposite given today’s debate. No one is suggesting that there will not be points at which we may want to have a way to amend legislation, but I have concerns about clause 7. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) because I have a completely different opinion on what clause 7 offers. This is about so much more than taxes on fish.
It is important that our constituents understand that we are discussing a clause that gives Ministers the ability to introduce legislation when they consider it appropriate. I consider pudding always to be appropriate, but it is not necessarily necessary. This is one of those matters where the wording is crucial. The deficiencies that the Bill identifies are not limited as long as something can be called a deficiency, which is a huge loophole into which Ministers can reach.
The SIs that Ministers can bring in will have the effect of primary legislation—the same as any Act of Parliament—and the legislation can abolish functions of the European Union covering a whole range of issues. It would be a brave, bold, disciplined Minister who is not tempted by those powers. That is what we are discussing tonight. The hon. Member for Wealden suggested that the provisions do not look like a power grab, but they do not give power to the courts; they put power in Downing Street. That is the Opposition’s concern, which my Front-Bench colleagues have so ably set out.
In the time available, I want to explain my particular concerns about the Henry VIII powers and amendment 332, which relates to a good example of what could go wrong.
It is clear that the Henry VIII powers are not about taking rights away; they are about sweeping them away. As the House of Lords Constitution Committee said, the use of such powers
“remains a departure from constitutional principle”.
We know from recent years just how often Ministers have been tempted: cuts to tax credits, student maintenance grants, fracking, fox hunting, winter fuel payments, the electoral register and individual voter registration, and legal aid entitlements. Whether or not someone agrees with those policies, they are not fish taxes. They are not minor amendments to existing legislation. They represent major policy changes that the Government pushed through, or tried to push through, using SIs.
Since 1950, over 170,000 statutory instruments have been laid by Departments—2,500 a year. The hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, is not in his place, but he was talking about 1,000 SIs resulting from this legislation alone, which is half a year’s worth of work and represents an awful lot of sifting. Only 17 of those 170,000 SIs were rejected. Indeed, the last time that the Commons rejected a statutory instrument was in 1979. The House of Lords has been more robust, having rejected six such instruments, and it has been rewarded with the Strathclyde review.
Amendment 49 is important because it is clear that when Governments have the ability to use SIs in this way, they do so. It is also clear that this House has not been able to exercise a comparable power of check and balance. Even when such SIs are lawful, the Supreme Court has said that they should be challenged in court. As the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) said, this Bill is almost a lawyer’s charter.
I want to give the hon. Member for Wealden the example from amendment 332, which covers the elephant in the room during our debates on this Bill and relates to the rights of the British public and of future British citizens around freedom of movement. Freedom of movement has been bandied about as the reason why many people voted for us to leave the European Union. It is a key pillar of the single market—I will be supporting amendment 124 this evening because the single market represents the best deal for all our constituents—but we must address the question what we mean by freedom of movement.
We know that freedom of movement is a right worth fighting for. It means that kids in our communities can work for companies that have bases in Berlin or Rome, and they can be sent there without any hesitation. It means that if someone falls in love with their French exchange partner, they can move to Paris with them or the exchange can come and live here. It means that someone can be one of 4 million students every year who spend a year in another European country benefiting from that kind of education. These are freedoms that our communities are likely to need more options to access in the future, not less. It also means that people have come to our country and helped our NHS. They have brought jobs and investment, and, yes, British citizens have fallen in love with them. Their kids have gone to school with our kids. They are our neighbours, our friends and our family.
All that is now at risk. Whether we voted leave or remain, whether we think the referendum was about freedom of movement or leaving the single market, we should support the idea that Parliament, not Ministers,
should make or rewrite decisions if Ministers do not like the outcome of our discussions. It is clear that the failure of the previous Prime Minister to reform freedom of movement does not mean that we should give up these rights without asking about those changes, and that is what amendment 332 would give us as a Parliament the power to do. It would stop clause 7 being used to make that a decision made by means of a statutory instrument.
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It is clear that many different decisions could be made—on whether rules could be put in place to require someone to have a previous job offer before coming to the UK; on whether we could apply an emergency brake, to learn from the Swiss; on whether we could recognise that many of the problems in our labour market are down not to freedom of movement but to exploitative labour practices, and that ending freedom of movement will only make that worse, making migrant workers even more of a target; or on whether training UK citizens to be able to compete in the modern world, rather than blaming immigrants for being better qualified, will give us a better future. The benefits that have come from immigration are worthy of our protection, too, rather than being written out by Ministers behind closed doors.
Amendment 332 is not just about freedom of movement; it is also about refugee rights that we have already heard the Minister say he cannot guarantee. I spent the weekend in Calais talking to people living in the mud, and I do not feel proud that our Government refused to make that guarantee. They are reneging on the Dublin regulations, which is why I support new clause 53, and I wish we would push it to a vote. We saw how the Government treated the Dubs children, and that is how they will treat refugees and our EU citizen neighbours and friends if they can get away with it. That is why clause 7 needs to be amended—to make sure that decisions about anyone’s future come to the House rather than to back offices in statutory instruments.
The debates today about equalities and the environment all reflect decisions about the future of our communities and about the single market. We cannot keep fudging them. We cannot keep kicking the can down the road. We have to give the British people some certainty and clarity about how decisions will be made.
Henry VIII himself argued:
“It certainly strikes the beholder with astonishment, to perceive what vast difficulties can be overcome by the pigmy arms of little mortal man, aided by science and directed by superior skill.”
Let me honest with the Ministers—I do not believe that the pigmy arms of little mortal men and women can be this sifting committee. It is like a turkey voting for Christmas to be held twice a year. This is no resolution to the problems of this bill. We cannot even force the Government to bring an issue to the House if we believe that they should. Clause 7 stops us rising to the challenge that the Minister set—to overcome these difficulties on behalf of our constituents, no matter how complicated or sensitive the issue might be. I hope that Ministers will not hide behind Henry VIII powers but embrace his call for inquiry and scrutiny, because then this place at its best really can take back control.