Medicines and Medical Devices Bill — House of Lords, 2021-01-12
Topic: Government Operations
Igor Judge (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I apologise to the House; this is the first time I have spoken on this Bill and I have not been able to speak earlier in the proceedings, so I will try to be brief. I also assume that, notwithstanding the recent vote on sunset clauses, the Minister’s response during the debate indicates that the Government will not be very interested in leaving it in the legislation. This Bill’s importance is obvious. It is hardly regulation light; to the contrary, in the modern way, it has a banquet of regulation-making powers which would, as the debate has shown, enable the Minister to extend policy and create policy by statutory instrument. For that purpose, I need simply refer to the observations of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, in the previous debate In the 30 December debate on the Bill on the trade agreement with the EU, I suggested that, now that all that was done finally, we in this House at any rate needed to focus on the sovereignty not of the Prime Minister or the Executive but of Parliament over the Executive, and proper parliamentary control over the legislative process. We are, as has been discussed, no longer bound to implement EU directives—hence, in part, this Bill. We should decide now—and if not now, when?—to brake, or at any rate better to control, the damaging, wide-ranging, regulation-making powers which now regularly come our way Time and again, the cross-party committees of the House have complained about, for example, skeleton Bills, Henry VIII powers and inappropriate delegated powers. Time and again, in Bill after Bill, the pleas—convincing, constitutional and persuasive—have been totally ignored. A cascade of regulation-making powers continues its unabated flood in every Bill that comes before the House, and this Bill is such an example That is not the end of it. The consequences are vividly described in the report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, dated 17 December 2020, just a few days before Christmas. It contains devastating criticisms of risks to proper scrutiny currently observed by that committee. I commend its reading to the whole House. In the first year of this Session, we had 901 statutory instruments. Of those relevant to this Bill, the number from the Department of Health alone was 126. No one in the report has suggested that the department’s work is exempt from its wide-ranging, broad criticism The wider use of the super-affirmative process would ensure better parliamentary scrutiny and control of the Executive, which for too long have simply ignored the constant urgings of the parliamentary committees in this House, in particular, as this Bill shows, the recently expressed concerns of the Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers Committee. One day they will ask why they bother. They do so only in the hope that, one day, the Executive of the day will take notice As these pleas have been ignored and have failed, and, as is perfectly plain, as I indicated at the outset, the Minister’s reservations and distaste for consolidation and sunset clauses were absolutely manifest, this amendment will secure that, for this Bill and for this department, with these wide-ranging and important powers, the super-affirmative level of control should be exercised. The time to exercise it is now. It is time that the power is exercised more frequently.