My Lords, Amendments 12, 14 and 16 in this group are in my name. However, I will first support Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Trees, which seems to be both sensible and necessary to be made to the Bill if we are to have a committee in this form at all. I also support the amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising.
I have one query about the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Trees, which I will come to in relation to my Amendment 16. The first two, Amendments 12 and 14, underline the requirement in those amendments for the committee to deal with only future policy and when it is being formulated. Surely the value of this committee if it is to have any real
effect is to perform a role not already covered by other committees, to draw attention to failures of consideration if it finds them when policy is being formulated or has just been formulated and before implementation, so that the defects can if necessary and possible be remedied before the policy is enacted.
In the Bill at present there is no limit as to how far back the committee can go. The draft terms of reference, which the Minister kindly sent us, express a hope—no more—that it will concentrate on more recent policies, but there is nothing to stop the committee going back as far as it chooses. Ministers come and go—so do civil servants. An examination of whether a past Secretary of State gave all due regard to the effect of a policy on animal welfare, possibly long enacted, will be difficult if not impossible in many cases. The additional cost of this committee, according to the terms of reference, is to be no more than half a million pounds from Defra’s budget. However, there is no calculation of how much time will be needed to be spent by other departments trying to answer the inevitable investigation into how decisions were made. It must take time from the work of those departments in each case, and of course be at public expense too. This committee surely cannot be intended to be a quasi post-legislative scrutiny committee, yet the Bill is without any limit as to its remit.
My Amendment 16 removes implementation from the committee’s remit. After Committee I looked forward to seeing the draft terms of reference because, as it stands, the purpose, remit, scope and any limits on the powers of the committee are not clear in the Bill. I hoped they would be remedied, at the very least, in guidance. Sadly, they are not. Instead, in a number of respects, the Bill and the terms of the reference are in direct conflict.
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Amendment 16 removes policy that has been implemented from the committee’s remit. In this, it differs from the way in which Amendment 1 from the noble Lord, Lord Trees, is drafted. In giving all due regard to the ways in which a policy might adversely affect animal welfare, a Minister will have to balance those considerations against the effect of the policy on many other considerations. These may be transport needs, housing needs or public health needs, perhaps. In other words, is the rail link necessary despite the bats that are on the route?
Those other considerations cannot sensibly be part of this committee’s remit. It would be unlikely to have the material unless it is to rerun the Minister’s policy-making role in all its aspects, and it would almost inevitably lack the expertise to do so. The terms of reference support my view that implementation should not concern this committee, unlike Clause 2(1). The terms of reference say that the committee is not expected to consider individual operational decisions nor to consider matters of fiscal policy. Individual operational decisions are then defined as decisions for which no bespoke ministerial direction is sought or required. For example, a policy that sets up a licensing scheme would constitute policy which the committee could consider, but the granting of an individual licence under the scheme and the effects of doing so would not fall within that remit.
In Clause 2(2), the question that the committee has to answer in its report speaks of having regard to the ways in which the policy
“might have an adverse effect”
on animal welfare—not, I note, “has had” an adverse effect. Policy which has been put into effect—in other words, implemented—needs to be outside the remit. As it stands, there is confusion both within Clause 2 and between the Bill and the terms of reference.
I am sorry to say it, but the Bill is a dog’s breakfast and that has not been improved by these terms of reference. I am sorry that the Opposition, on whose Benches I sit, have not seen fit to raise the objections to what are, one would have thought, fundamental defects in legislation. If the Bill is not clarified and amended to indicate its limits and its purpose, then a great deal of public money and public time is going to be wasted on it. I still marvel at how a Government who were elected in part on a promise to reduce bureaucracy, especially that emanating from Europe, have taken the wholly uncontroversial issue of animal sentience, which no one would have argued with, and are trying to turn it into a textbook bureaucratic nightmare.