My Lords, the Minister said, in introducing the amendments, that they were carefully targeted and specific. With great respect to her, she could scarcely have chosen less appropriate adjectives for the Henry VIII clause that she seeks to introduce through Amendment 247YY. It is astonishingly broad, even by modern standards, as my noble and learned friend Lord Hope said. To give the House a flavour, it allows the Secretary of State to make any provision that they consider “appropriate” about the operation of any relevant enactment connected to the effects of nutrients and water that could affect a habitat’s site. Relevant enactments include all Acts of Parliament, including the future one we are debating today.
I will add a few other points on that clause to those made by my noble and learned friend. The Delegated Powers Committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, has stated that such broad Henry VIII powers must always be fully justified—all the more so, one might think, when they are introduced at the last moment without any public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny. The committee also said that inadequate justification for such exceptionally wide powers had been given and recommended, in terms, that this clause should not form part of the Bill.
The position has not improved since then. The explainer circulated on Monday had nothing to say about the clause at all, although I and others raised it with Ministers last week. In fairness, the Minister said that she had written to the committee today, but the letter did not appear on its website when I checked 10 minutes ago, and I have no reason to suppose that the committee has changed its mind.
We cannot get into the habit of passing clauses such as this one without the clearest and most compelling reasons for them. This clause may have been conceived as a fail-safe in hastily prepared legislation, but its effect is to abdicate the influence of Parliament altogether over substantial and important areas of policy. Why would we sign up to that? The Minister undertook that these delegated powers would be used sparingly, and I do not doubt her good intentions. However, with respect to her, no such undertaking can have any value when the clause will expire not in this Parliament or the next, but in the Parliament after that, on 31 March 2030. I see every reason to follow the recommendation of the Delegated Powers Committee and to vote against the addition of the amendment.
There is a practical, as well as a constitutional, reason why I propose to vote against the amendment. If those who wish to oppose the main amendment—Amendment 247YYA—are successful, they will also need to exclude this clause because, if we do not, the powers that it grants will be quite broad enough to allow the Government simply to reintroduce the substantive measures by secondary legislation, or indeed
to do anything else that they might wish to do in this general area, without Parliament having the power to amend it or, in practice, to block it. As I said, that is true not only of this Government but of the next Government and the one after that.
I was relieved to hear that my noble and learned friend Lord Hope will not press his probing amendment, because, as he said, it is inadequate to meet the problems identified by the Delegated Powers Committee. Like him, I am not content with Amendment 247YY and, if it is put to a Division, I will vote to exclude it.