My Lords, we have heard many excellent speeches in this short debate, and I agree in particular with what my noble friend Lady Andrews has said.
I am a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. The committee shares many of the concerns expressed by the Delegated Powers Committee in its report. However, I would somewhat disagree with the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, on the behaviour of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition. We have to be considered and careful about using fatal Motions, but to my knowledge it is certainly not Labour’s position that those fatal powers should never be used.
On the substance of the Trade Bill, the Agriculture Bill and the immigration Bill, I had assumed that the Government are putting extensive delegated powers into the legislation basically because they do not know what their post-Brexit policy is going to be—they do not really have a clue. For instance, they do not have a clue about what national strategy we are going to pursue on trade. Will it be one that maintains our high standards, or will it be one that tries desperately to get trade agreements with the rest of the world that lower standards in order to open markets in the hope that that will compensate for the loss of market access in Europe? I think that the Government do not know. There are deep divisions inside the Conservative Party on where the Government should go on these questions, so the simple thing to do is to put a lot of these policy decisions into delegated powers which Ministers will have to decide on at some future point.
However, in this Bill, I am concerned for a quite different reason: in this case the Government know only too well, in particular on the clauses on the Northern Ireland protocol, what they want to do with the powers that they would have. If we cannot remove those offending Northern Ireland clauses from this Bill, then if delegated legislation comes to this House based on them, we should vote against it every single time, because that is clearly unconstitutional and it would be perfectly within the powers of this House so to do.