My Lords, in moving Amendment 12, I will also speak to Amendments 27, 38, 46, 72, 97 and 160 in my name. These amendments would remove the Bill’s regulation-making power, which is fully in line with the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Its report is a comprehensive review of these issues; your Lordships will be pleased to hear that I will therefore not reiterate them at length. Later, we will hear the wise words of my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford, who will
describe that your Lordships’ House is approaching a watershed on this issue. He is of course right; this train has been coming down the tracks for some time.
A while ago, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, gave a lecture at King’s College London entitled “Ceding Power to the Executive: The Resurrection of Henry VIII”. He made the stark point that parliamentary sovereignty is the antithesis of executive sovereignty. The two concepts are mutually contradictory. The democratic process is not meant to give—and our constitutional arrangements are not meant to provide us with—executive sovereignty. The burden of the noble and learned Lord’s argument was that Henry VIII powers, although paradoxically conferred upon the Executive by none other than Parliament, are an affront to parliamentary sovereignty. That lecture was held in 2016. Since then, we have seen an acceleration of the erosion of parliamentary sovereignty through these means.
As the House of Lords Constitution Committee put it in its report of the Strathclyde review some five years ago:
“Delegated powers in primary legislation have increasingly been drafted in broad and poorly-defined language that has permitted successive governments to use delegated legislation to address issues of policy and principle, rather than points of an administrative or technical nature.”
This Bill pushes that envelope yet further. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee was clear. It described some of the powers in that report as either “extraordinary” or “unprecedented”. To justify these extraordinary and unprecedented powers, the Government cite the need for legislation to evolve. The possibility of unknown unknowns required a yet unknowable legislative response and a yearning for law-making speed. None of these justifications is extraordinary and none of them is unprecedented.
I beg to move.