| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Bercow: It may come as a shock to the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew), but some right. hon. and hon. Members think that it is incumbent upon them properly to scrutinise Government legislation. He had better get used to it, because there is much more scrutiny coming.
Does the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. George) agree that it would be helpful if the Minister would tell the House when he believes that that summary note was deposited in the Library? The admirable and efficient Library staff looked askance at my request for it and were not conscious of the existence in the Library of such a document.
Mr. George: That was not an intervention for me. However, I certainly appreciate the fact that, as the Minister promised, he provided to Committee members a precis of the legal advice, which I should be happy to share with other hon. Members. I am sure that the Minister would not wish to restrict me in doing that.
In our previous consideration of the Bill, on Second Reading and in Committee, I contacted industry representatives both within my constituency and from the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations to check whether they felt very strongly that hon. Members should table amendments on the matter or that the House should be detained in considering it, to make certain that important legislation is properly scrutinised. I think that I can report to the House that the general feeling in the industry is that the Bill should be passed without unnecessary delay, as it is not causing vexation within the industry.
In his speech, the Minister made a point about the Sea Fish Industry Authority not mentioning the problem in its annual report. In Committee, he said:
- However, it was not thought appropriate to make any reference to it, as no decision had been made at that time about how to deal with the issue.--[Official Report, Standing Committee G, 14 March 2000; c. 16.]
- This view would be consistent with "Statement of Standard Accounting Practice 18" and its successor "Financial Reporting Standard 12" which provide that in those cases where the probability of the ultimate outcome having a material effect on the financial statements (ie those of SFIA in this case) is remote, no disclosure of the contingent liability is required in the accounts.
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome): I entirely agree with my hon. Friend that, although it was very helpful to receive the Minister's letter, the response--that it was considered to be "too remote a possibility" to
warrant inclusion in the annual report and accounts--was quite extraordinary. If the possibility really were so remote, is it not rather surprising that we are debating legislation to deal with it? I think that the charges should have been in the annual report and accounts, and I am very surprised that the advice to Ministers was otherwise.
Mr. George: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for endorsing the line that I am taking. Perhaps Ministers and officials should reflect on the lessons to be learned from this rather shabby affair. I think that the Minister fully admits that mistakes were made and identified in 1996, before the Government came into office. I should hope, therefore, that he will be able to take an objective view of the matter, and perhaps to accept the fact that--in the light of an unacceptable failure to report something that really should have been in the public domain--both accounting practices and the responsibility of Government organisations should be reviewed.
As for the legislation's retrospective nature, perhaps we should have an opportunity retrospectively to review the success of safety grants, which are very important to the industry itself. Perhaps we shall have another opportunity to debate that matter--which I think the Minister will accept is of very deep concern to the industry. Indeed, the unacceptable loss of life in the industry deeply concerns fishing communities around the coast of the United Kingdom. I should hope that we will have an opportunity for such a debate, perhaps in Government time, in the not-too-distant future.
As I said, I asked the Minister to circulate a precis of the legal advice. However, having seen it I am surprised that it took until the Bill was considered in Committee before we could prise that information out of the Minister. The information helped to support his line, which I think we all accepted, that, with the Government's heavily clogged legislative programme, he would not unnecessarily--purely for the sheer hell of it--introduce new legislation. The precis of the legal advice could have been provided earlier. That said, I am grateful to have it, even though we received it rather late.
My right hon. and hon. Friends and I have no objection to ensuring that this important Bill concludes its stages in the House this evening.
8.10 pm
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst): The more that we hear of the Bill, the more obvious it is that it is a bit of a muddle. It started out as a cosy little consensual matter that was sold to the House as being of little import and almost rather trivial. It was one of those dubious measures that had all-party agreement. Now even the Liberal Democrats--the friends of the Government--have some doubts, although some intimate correspondence has obviously passed between the Minister and his friends in the Liberal Democrat party from which the rest of us have been excluded, because the relevant document is apparently not in the Library. I shall come back to that in a moment.
In one of his moments of transparency and insight in Committee, the Minister said:
- The Bill is retrospective. As I said on Second Reading, the Government do not take lightly the introduction of retrospective legislation.--[Official Report, Standing Committee G, 14 March 2000; c. 4.]
-
That point has dogged the Bill from the start. In fairness to the Government, they have made no secret of the fact that it was retrospective, but, as the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. George) has just said, the argument is whether retrospective legislation is justified to solve a problem that may not have existed. Even now we have not got to the bottom of that. I certainly have not, because I have not yet seen the note on the legal advice that the members of the Committee have seen, but that is not yet in the Library as the Minister claimed that it was. The rest of us who were not on the Committee are in the dark about the content of the note.
Mr. Forth: Yes; Government incompetence comes at the top of my list. That is the most obvious explanation. Conspiracy would be second on my list. The Minister wants to appear, on the record, to be open with the House, but on the slightest investigation that appears to be a false impression.
Mr. Leigh: It is worse than that. I have obtained a copy of the letter in question--not from the Library, but from my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss) on the Front Bench. The Minister said in the letter that he had arranged--not that he was arranging--for a copy to be placed in the Library. That was on 2 May. What is going on?
Mr. Forth: We must get to the bottom of that. I shall come back to the issue when a little more time has elapsed. We shall see whether the letter emerges from the Library. For the moment, I want to go on to some other serious matters that arose during the previous proceedings on the Bill.
The Minister has revealed something else relatively new to us today. I suspect that the issue was preying on his and his officials' minds and he thought that he had better get it out in the open before it was revealed in some other way, although the more that I look at the Bill and the more that we consider it on Third Reading, the more I suspect that it will need to be examined pretty closely in another place. We may be forced to accept retrospection, but I do not know whether it will go down well at the other end of the building.
As far as I could follow him, the Minister seemed to say that there had been a running debate between the Sea Fish Industry Authority and its auditors about its accounts and whether the charges should be reflected. He then appeared to say that the matter was regarded as being in suspension in some way, pending legal advice. When the legal advice finally emerged, the Minister said, as far as I could tell, that because the matter should be legislated on, there was no need to act on the accounts. I thought that he then said that any need to reflect the matter in the accounts, about which the auditors had previously expressed disquiet, was rendered otiose by the legislation.
That worried me, because it seemed to imply that the auditors, the authority or the Ministry--or all of them--had satisfied themselves that, on the possibility of legislation reaching its final stage and receiving Royal Assent, no further action need be taken. I suspect that if the matter were looked at in more detail than we can manage this evening, because of the Government's vicious and arrogant guillotine, a worrying lacuna would emerge. We are dealing with public finance, the auditing of accounts and the relationship between a Government Department dispensing taxpayers' money and a Government agency--the Sea Fish Industry Authority--spending that money. That should be above suspicion, but it appears that there has been a certain amount of foot dragging, to say the least, and that the relationship between the authority, its auditors and the Department was either overly cosy, overly mutually congratulatory or less than rigorous--I put it no more strongly than that.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |