My Lords, I am very grateful for the Minister’s response. He knows that I respect him greatly, but he said the current scheme had complexity and uncertainty and, with great respect, I do not think he added simplicity and clarity regarding the successor scheme.
My lack of a social life will bear witness to the fact that I was in for every day of the Committee and Report stages of the Subsidy Control Bill, as I will be for this Bill. I asked about complexities and uncertainties. The Minister replied to me in February:
“To respond to the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, that state aid rules would continue to apply even if the UK’s negotiating position were accepted, these are specific and limited circumstances. I trust that this will allay the Committee’s concerns on this important issue.”—[Official Report, 2/2/22; col. GC 244.]
The Minister is now saying that those “specific and limited circumstances”, which the Government said would result if they were successful in their negotiations,
will be impossible to secure, so they are now seeking sweeping powers. He did not indicate when that policy change happened. It is a major change, and I simply do not know when it happened.
That position is also contradicted. The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, referred to Invest NI. As I did at Second Reading, I will read from the Invest NI website:
“This dual market access position means that Northern Ireland can become a gateway for the sale of goods … This is a unique proposition … These additional benefits”.
Invest NI is using dual market access to promote Northern Ireland. The Government may be right that this is now acting to the disbenefit of Northern Ireland, and we have asked for evidence for this. If they are designing a new scheme, the real risk, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, indicated, is that uncertainty will have a major chill effect that will bring about the very things the Government say they are concerned about.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, that we are asked to legislate for unknown unknowns. On Monday I called these “Rumsfeld clauses”. The Government are seeking powers for known unknowns, but if they get it wrong in the future—which they do not know about—they want powers to deal with it now. The problem is that none of the powers in this Bill, which is replacing the Subsidy Control Act, has any of the restrictions and requirements of the regulating powers of that Act. The breadth of the powers goes way beyond the Subsidy Control Act, which is now proposed to be a single element.
Supposedly, these powers are simply for what Ministers consider appropriate, but I am not sure that a Minister would ever think their actions inappropriate when they bring forward proposals. It is for the law to say what is not appropriate in regulations; that is our job. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is absolutely right: it is not about what just Ministers or even necessarily just opponents on the Opposition Benches might use. It might be their successors as Conservative Ministers—we have had a fair few of them—who completely change policy. This is so broad.
A point of substantial importance is that there is a deep inconsistency in the Bill. The Government seem to think that it is acceptable to have a dual regulatory regime for goods but one route for subsidised goods. I have seen no mechanism that might cover a subsidised good. I really do not know whether that situation is clear.
With the greatest respect to the Minister, I do not think the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, received a sufficient response to her question. She will make up her own mind about this, of course. Agricultural subsidies are not included in the Subsidy Control Act—we debated this long and hard—and although the Minister said that this will now be covered in the proposals, I do not know where. The danger is that there is now an enormous black hole in the provision of agricultural subsidies. Given the agricultural support scheme announced earlier this year, I do not think it fair to have these concerns.
I do not think the Minister has satisfied the Committee. I hope that he and his officials will reflect on Hansard and provide more of the information we want to see. Unless the Government’s proposals are made much clearer, significant doubt will remain. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.