European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-03-07
Topic: Government Operations
John Kevin Sharkey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My noble friend Lord Tyler has added his name to Amendments 71, 116, 253 and 257. Unfortunately, he is unwell and unable to be in his place today. He has, however, advised me —extensively—to rely heavily in my remarks on the report of the DPRRC published on 1 February. As I am sure that Members will know, the report was highly critical of this Bill. It noted that: "The Bill confers on Ministers wider Henry VIII powers than we have ever seen", and went on to discuss some of these powers in detail. The first it examined was the use in the Bill of "appropriate" instead of "necessary" as a test for action by secondary legislation. The committee pointed out that this gives the Minister much wider discretion than the Government’s White Paper commitment not to make major changes to policy beyond those necessary to ensure continued proper functioning of the law after we leave the EU. Instead of a test based on objective necessity, the Government have substituted the much wider and entirely subjective test of the Minister’s judgment about what he or she considers appropriate. The Government must explain why they have abandoned the White Paper commitment. It would help us to understand their reasoning if the Government could also provide the House with concrete and substantive examples of where a test of necessity may fail to produce continued proper functioning of the law I am sure that when he does this, the Minister will want to acknowledge and deal with paragraphs 8 to 10 of the DPRRC report, which concluded, via a worked example, that a proper test of necessity does not prevent his choosing between possible solutions when the "necessary" threshold is in fact met. I am sure that he will tell the House why he disagrees with the DPRRC’s recommendation in paragraph 12, which simply says: "The subjective ‘appropriateness’ test in clause 7 should be circumscribed in favour of a test based on objective necessity" As the DPRRC remarked, the Bill is packed with Henry VIII clauses, and it might be worth remembering what actually happened when the Minister’s predecessors, Thomas Cromwell and Lord Audley, presented the original Henry VIII power, the Bill of Proclamations, to Parliament. Historians have disagreed about Cromwell’s motives but not about what the Bill sought to do—to make the King’s proclamations enforceable as law by the courts. Both Houses of Parliament saw the evident dangers in this and both resisted. The eventual outcome, the Act of Proclamations, was a heavily revised version of the original Bill. It showed Parliament’s strength of feeling on the issue and its skill in avoiding direct confrontation with the King. In those days, the penalty for defying the Executive was a little sharper-edged than a visit from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. In the end, Parliament passed the Bill but amended it to ensure that the provisions for enforcement would be wholly unworkable—and so it proved I am not suggesting exactly the same approach, but I do suggest that we take the same view as our predecessors about giving wide, direct law-making powers to the Executive. We should do what Parliament did in 1539—we should resist.