European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-20
Topic: Government Operations
Robert James Buckland (Conservative, Centre-right): I think it must follow that when there is no Executive functioning in Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Office is carrying out functions as a substitute for the Executive, the duty will apply to that Department. I assure the hon. Lady that when we introduce statutory instruments, there will be explanatory memorandums from one source or another. Various Departments will have different responsibilities for the drafting and publication of the statutory instruments, and it will be their duty to produce the explanatory memorandums for Members to consider. I cannot envisage an exception being made. Northern Ireland will be covered in the way in which the hon. Lady wants it to be Paragraph 1(4) of schedule 5 enables the Queen’s printer to make arrangements to publish documents that may be considered useful in connection with anything else published under the schedule. That, I think, allows for the approach that the hon. Member for Nottingham East is requesting. We are committed to ensuring that the law remains accessible and comprehensible after exit day, and on that basis, I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the new clause, which I think he said was a probing measure. He will have noted my comment, and I understand his position Amendments 76 and 77 have been addressed in particular by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West. Amendment 77 seeks to place the power for a Minister to make provision about judicial notice and the admissibility in legal proceedings of specified evidence of certain matters into the Bill. Judicial notice is a term that covers matters that are to be treated as already within the knowledge of the court, and are therefore not required to be "proved", as other evidence would be, in the usual way. Amendment 76 would remove that power from schedule 5, while not replacing the provisions that clarify the scope of that power The power in part 2 of the schedule covers a limited, technical area, and the affirmative procedure will apply. My worry is that, with the removals that amendment 76 would make, we will lose clarity on how those powers are to be applied. I imagine that the intention of those who support the amendments is that those clarifying provisions would be inserted underneath the power, but I think that we achieve greater clarity by putting them in this schedule in the way that we have, so I respectfully ask the hon. and learned Lady and the other Members who have tabled the amendments not to press them. Finally, I will deal with amendment 348. It is tempting for me to plunge into the debate about impact assessments and regulatory and sectoral analyses, but this is an amendment about this Bill, of course, and I remind all Members that an impact assessment for this Bill was published when it was introduced. That is in line with the general practice of Governments of different parties in recent years of publishing impact assessments alongside legislation. We want to continue pursuing that approach, but it must be done in a proportionate and appropriate way Amendment 348 would impose an open-ended requirement on the Queen’s printer to publish impact assessments, and could, I fear, create a duty it could not meet. The Queen’s printer does not have a responsibility to decide what should be published alongside legislation; it merely publishes what the Government ask it to, and quite rightly so, we might think. At the same time, Ministers have a specific responsibility, endorsed by Parliament, not to release information that would expose our negotiating position. This amendment would risk doing precisely that in a way that would put the responsibility on to a non-ministerial department—the Queen’s printer—which, with respect to it, is in no place to know what analysis is being undertaken, or to make a judgment about what can be published appropriately, safely and proportionately In the context of those remarks, I ask the hon. Member for Nottingham East to withdraw the new clause, and I support the passage of clause 13 and schedule 5 and beg that they stand part of the Bill.