My Lords, I shall take Amendments 25 and 30 together and also speak to Amendment 43. I am raising tonight only the issues in the 19th report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. I will not go into detail, but Clauses 4 and 6 give powers to prescribe information that must be provided to the Secretary of State by a person who wishes to release or market a precision-bred organism. Clauses 3 and 4 impose conditions restricting the release, including the requirement to give a release notice to the Secretary of State accompanied by any required information.
Paragraph 10 of the committee’s report states:
“The ‘form and content’ of release notices and marketing notices and the ‘required information’ that must accompany them is to be prescribed in regulations made by the Secretary of State”.
Paragraph 11 of the report states:
“By way of justification for these powers, the Memorandum simply asserts that each power ‘allows the Secretary of State to deal with administrative matters’”.
The committee said:
“We accept that the form that release notices and marketing notices are required to take might fairly be described as an ‘administrative matter’ but the same cannot be said about the content of such notices and the ‘required information’ that must be submitted with them.”
It went on to say in paragraph 13:
“Accordingly, we find it surprising that the Bill itself says nothing at all about what that information should comprise and instead leaves it entirely to ministers to decide—and in regulations subject only to the negative procedure.”
The conclusion of the committee was set out in paragraph 14:
“We consider that: the information that those who propose to release or market precision bred organisms are to be required to provide to the Secretary of State about this in a notice under clause 4 or 6 is a matter of significant public interest given that decisions about whether to permit such release or marketing will be based on that information”.
The committee felt that, so far,
“the Government have failed to justify the inclusion in those clauses of powers that leave it entirely to ministers to determine what that information must comprise—and by regulations subject only to the negative procedure”.
The committee is really asking the Minister to the provide this Committee with a convincing justification for the delegation of power in Clauses 4(3) and 6(2).
I will make a few brief points about Amendment 43, which relates to Clause 18(1) on the power to prescribe information that must be included in the precision-breeding register. The matters about which the register must contain information are release notices under Clause 4, marketing notices under Clause 6, reports
provided to the Secretary of State by the advisory committee under Clause 7, reports provided to the Secretary of State by the welfare advisory body under Clause 12, notices given by the Secretary of State under Clauses 8 and 13, and enforcement notices. Paragraph 20 of the committee report states:
“However, the information that the register must contain about these matters is left to be prescribed by the Secretary of State by regulations subject to the negative procedure.”
The delegated powers memorandum supplied with the Bill by the Government attempts to provide some of the information but, at paragraph 22, the committee found
“this an unconvincing explanation for there being nothing at all on the face of the Bill about the information that the register must contain about the matters in question and for this instead to be left entirely to ministers”.
The committee therefore concluded that
“the substance of the obligation that is to be imposed on the Government to keep a public ‘precision breeding register’ as a means of delivering transparency … is an important matter of public interest; a key aspect of the substance of that obligation is the information that the register will be required to contain about the matters specified in clause 18; it is therefore important that provision prescribing that information is subject to an appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny”.
The committee felt that
“leaving it entirely to ministers to prescribe that information by regulations therefore demands a convincing justification”.
So far,
“the Government have failed to provide this; and … unless the Minister can provide the House with a convincing justification for it, the power in clause 18(1) is inappropriate.”
That is basically the submission of the Delegated Powers Committee on these three points, which I am happy to put to the Committee and to the Minister.