It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner). I am a supporter of the Bill. I think it is a good and proportionate Bill, but it is badly written. What the right hon. Lady said about Henry VIII clauses is absolutely spot on. Indeed, should the socialists ever be in government in the future I hope they will remember what she said, because skeleton Bills and Henry VIII clauses are bad parliamentary and constitutional practice .
It seems to me that it is hard to describe the right hon. Lady as having been wrong for tabling amendment 101— I will not vote for her, but I say none the less that she is far from being described as wrong. Clause 3 suggests:
“Regulations under this section may amend, repeal or revoke provision made by or under primary legislation passed…later in the same session of Parliament as this Act.”
On what basis can any Government claim to have the power to amend legislation that has not yet been passed? The only argument for doing so, which no Government would wish to advance, is incompetence. The only way to pass a subsequent Act without amending it before it is passed is if we have not noticed what it was saying in the first place, and I cannot understand why a Government would wish to put such a measure in a Bill. Indeed, I am puzzled as to how clause 3 managed to get through the
intergovernmental procedures that take place before legislation is presented to the House. I do not understand how the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee managed to approve a Bill with such a wide-ranging Henry VIII clause and which fails to set out in detail what powers the Government actually want.
I will support the Bill because its aim is worthy, but the means of achieving that aim are not properly constitutional. Henry VIII powers, it has been established, should be used exceptionally or when there is no other alternative. During the passage of the Coronavirus Act 2020 it was perfectly reasonable to have Henry VIII powers. Why? Because the Act was brought forward extremely quickly, there was little time to revise it and there was not an enormous amount of time to work out precisely what revisions to existing statute law may be needed. Emergency legislation falls into that category. But this is not emergency legislation; this is a Bill that we in the Conservative party have been cogitating about since at least our last manifesto, if not back to about 2016. I have supported it all the way through. I wanted the Bill to come forward. I think it is the right thing to be doing, but there is no excuse for failing to do it properly.