My Lords, as the chairman of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I am delighted to say a few words on Amendment 27. No doubt my noble friend the Minister swotted up on all the briefs and the grand issues relating to Brexit and European trailers; little did she know that she would have to hear confessions from Members on all sides of the Committee about their experiences driving good trailers, big trailers and dodgy little trailers—and wheels falling off.
I am not sure whether I can trump the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, but as a boy up on the farm in the Highlands I was able to drive a tractor by the age of 10 and drive it on the highway by the age of 12. When I was allowed legally to drive a car on the highway, my first car was a three-gear Ford Prefect which, on a long downhill slope, I once got up to 62 miles an hour—I could drive the tractors a bit faster.
The Delegated Powers Committee has recommended the sifting committee procedure for Clauses 1 and 2. We recommend it for Clause 1 because, as we say in our report,
“the content of any regulations made under clause 1 will depend on future international agreements … there is no current indication as to what regulations under clause 1 might say or how important they might be, if they are needed at all … it cannot be known in advance that the negative procedure will always be suitable for regulations made under clause 1 … it might transpire that some regulations made under clause 1 might require the affirmative procedure”.
On Clause 2, to shorten our report to the basics, we cite the Explanatory Memorandum which states that,
“it is not yet clear what sort of a regime or regimes will need to be introduced and, in the interest of ensuring that the provisions cater for agreed scenarios and are not too wide, it is necessary to legislate by way of secondary legislation once negotiations have been concluded and the nature of any permit scheme that needs to be introduced is clear”.
We say:
“Although the Government do not currently know what regulations under clause 2 will contain or how significant they will be, the Government propose that the negative procedure will always apply”.
For that reason, we think that there should be a sifting mechanism where colleagues in the House can decide which ones are tiddly statutory instruments and the negative procedure is okay and which ones require the affirmative procedure.
We stress in paragraph 10:
“We are not seeking to make a sifting mechanism a general feature of our legislative landscape”—
we are not seeking to attach it to every Brexit Bill.
“However, the circumstances of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union have given rise to unique legislative challenges”.
We know that next year we may have 800 to 1,000 statutory instruments to get through, perhaps in a short period of time. In those circumstances we have recommended the sifting procedure to the House. I know that the Leader of the House, the Lord Privy Seal, has rejected that already, but we recommend it for the Bill because the first five clauses begin with the words, “Regulations may”. That is almost unique. Because there will be so many regulations and some will be routine, trivial and therefore not crucial, some will be mega important and may require the affirmative procedure, we commend the sifting mechanism—exactly the same procedure as we identified in the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, using the same secondary legislation scrutiny procedure, not creating any new all-singing all-dancing committee—to the Committee, and I commend it to my noble friend.