My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 122A, which is in this group. Before I start, I want to say how much I appreciated the contribution just made by my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond, which illustrated another example of Ministers putting provisions into Bills which they do not fully understand themselves. If they had spoken to any chief constable, any chief fire officer, or possibly anybody from North Yorkshire they would have known that this will not work. It will be very interesting to see how the Minister responds.
My amendment takes a broader look. It is not specifically concerned with the clauses relating to the problems my noble friend so ably outlined. It addresses the phrase which appears time and again:
“The Secretary of State may by regulations”,
et cetera. I ploughed my way through the first 38 clauses, and 18 start with exactly those words, three start with
“A Minister of the Crown must”
and four simply start with “Regulations may be made”. So 25 out of the first 38 clauses essentially say that the Secretary of State can do what he likes.
My amendment is not about that. It is about Clause 38(4), which goes far beyond that. It states:
“The Secretary of State may by regulations amend, revoke or repeal a provision of or made under an enactment in consequence of provision”
in subsection (1). To paraphrase, the Secretary of State can change his mind at any time and change the regulations to suit. It occurs to me that it would have been much quicker for the Government actually to take out those 38 clauses and to have a simple one-clause Bill, the first subsection of which would say, “The Secretary of State may by regulation do whatever he chooses”, and the second, “The Secretary of State may by regulation make any change of mind he has at any time he chooses”, because that covers the essence of these 38 clauses. Explaining the extent of the Secretary of State’s powers takes 245 pages in the memorandum, so it is, even by the Government’s own reckoning, a significant problem.
Almost nothing of substance appears in the Bill. Everything is subject to regulations. Even the missions are not defined, and every attempt so far to pin the Government down on any detail, or even on the broad principles, has been resisted by the Front Bench opposite. Everything is left to the supreme genius of the Secretary of State for the time being to decide what is to be done and how. In this case, in this clause, he or she is allowed to change his mind, to revoke, repeal, et cetera. Of course, that will produce regulations that we can, if we are lucky, in due course express an opinion on but which we ourselves in Parliament certainly will not be able to amend, revoke or repeal. The Secretary of State is taking powers that are certainly denied to those of us who will subsequently look at his regulations.
If it is good enough for the Secretary of State to have the power, at the drop of a hat, to amend, revoke and repeal, then why is it not good enough for Parliament? But that, of course, is a silly question; I realise that. How naive can I be? Power is to remain in Whitehall, not to be given to town halls and certainly not to Parliament. The provision in Clause 38 illustrates the point exactly. The Bill is not handing out new powers to anyone; it simply hands out new regulations. Going
through your Lordships’ House in parallel with this Bill is the retained EU law Bill. The starting point of that is that there is far too much regulation, red tape and bureaucracy, and we need to go through every Act and regulation that has been passed in the last 46 years and decide what to throw away. I think it is part of the two-out, one-in rule.
I suggest to the Government that the difficulties they face with that Bill would be substantially relieved if they were to produce a different Bill: the retention of local government law Bill, which would do exactly the same for local government as they are trying to do in respect of EU law.
4.15 pm
As a result of what we have in this Bill so far, levelling up is going to be largely incidental to the provision of additional levers of central government control. The Government’s capacity to design and manage the whole process as they choose is going to be strengthened. Then, when it does not work, this Clause gives them the power to tear it up and replace it with something else—all in the name of levelling up, of course. I would like the Minister to accept Amendment 122A just for the fig leaf of devolution, empowerment and levelling up, so that it can remain in place as we plough our way through the remaining 82 groups. It is emblematic of a systemic problem the Government have, and I have to say that the amendments moved by the Minister are yet another branch of the same thing.