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- House adjourned at twenty-three minutes to nine o'clock.
Official Report of the Grand Committee on the
Tax Credits Bill
Thursday, 16th May 2002.
The Committee met at four of the clock.
[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Skelmersdale) in the Chair.]
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Skelmersdale): Before I put the Question that the Title be postponed, it may be helpful to remind your Lordships of the procedure for today's Committee stage. Except in one important respect, our proceedings will be exactly as in a normal Committee of the Whole House. We shall go through the Bill clause by clause; noble Lords will speak standing; all noble Lords are free to attend and participate; and the proceedings will be recorded in Hansard. The one difference is that the House has agreed that there shall be no Divisions in the Grand Committee. Any issue on which agreement cannot be reached should be considered again at the Report stage when, if necessary, a Division may be called. Unless, therefore, an amendment is likely to be agreed to, it should be withdrawn.
I should explain what will happen if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting. The Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and will resume after 10 minutes.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Work and Pensions (Baroness Hollis of Heigham): I am sure that I, along with other noble Lords, may make procedural mistakes. I hope that I shall have the indulgence of the Committee if I do.
Before we embark on the business of the Committee, I wish to make an apology, particularly to Members of the Opposition Benches. On behalf of the Government, I apologise sincerely for the fact that so many Government amendments appeared on the Order Paper on Monday. I am acutely aware of the serious inconvenience that this will have caused noble Lords and I accept that it is completely at odds with the practice of the House.
Apart from the provisions in relation to children in respect of whom care is shared—these are the provisions I promised the noble Earl, Lord Russell, at Second Reading that we would come back with—these are technical amendments and drafting changes to improve the clarity of the Bill. The changes result from technical clarifications in the early part of the Bill. The amendments are numerous because similar consequential changes had then to be repeated in a number of different clauses. Many of those changes follow the splitting of Clause 17, which would otherwise have become unwieldy.
It was not possible to table parts of the package of changes earlier because the technical points are inter-related. I am afraid that the need for these amendments came to light after the Bill had been considered in another place. This is a highly technical Bill and, despite all the efforts of counsel and officials, the amendments were not ready to be tabled earlier.
We first gave priority to tabling amendments that made substantive changes, such as those in relation to appeals and to the annual review of the value of tax credit, and also—this was extremely, but rightly, time-consuming—to making draft regulations available to assist understanding of the Bill well in advance of Committee.
I am most grateful for the co-operation shown by noble Lords in rearranging the timing of Committee days. We, on our side, are trying to do as much as we can to minimise the difficulty these late amendments have caused. I have made available my speaking notes on the technical amendments. I am happy to arrange briefing meetings with officials to talk through those technical amendments, or to write to noble Lords with more detail. I am happy to flood noble Lords with as much paper as they can possibly manage.
Nevertheless, I fully accept that it is unacceptable for amendments to be tabled so late and in such numbers. The Paymaster General, Dawn Primarolo, wishes to join with me in offering our most sincere apologies for what has happened.
Lord Higgins: I am sure that the Committee would wish to accept the Minister's very gracious apology. After more than 35 years in Parliament, I cannot quite recall anything precisely the same happening. In particular, the timing seems quite extraordinary. The matter has gone right the way through the House of Commons without any second thoughts being expressed on behalf of the Government. As the Minister rightly said, the amendments were tabled only at the very last minute, with the result that the Committee's session on Tuesday had to be abandoned. I fully accept the Minister's apology which, as always, is combined with the helpful way in which she provided the Committee with papers and meetings and so on. But I am not sure that we should leave the matter there.
The Minister is accountable to Parliament and parliamentary accountability flows through the Minister. We are not able, if something has gone wrong, to summon officials to explain what happened. This was a matter of great controversy, Members will recall, back in the mid-1980s when the Treasury and Civil Service Committee went into this matter in great depth as a result of trickledown and so on. Finally the Liaison Committee produced a report on it. Basically, what was then agreed—and it is the principle on which we operate—is that the Minister is accountable to this House. If something has gone wrong in the department, the Minister will carry out an investigation and explain what happened following that investigation.
It seems quite extraordinary, however, that these are not simply technical amendments; they are most certainly drafting amendments. It would seem that the draftsman had something of a brainstorm. At the very last stage of the Bill, as it entered your Lordships' House, he decided that the thing was structurally wrong and therefore he had to table all these amendments.
Whether it was one draftsman or a change in draftsmen or that the draftsmen were distracted from their business to do something else, we do not know. If this kind of thing were to happen in business life, the individual would undoubtedly feel it appropriate either to be fired or to resign. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will feel it appropriate to find out precisely what happened and perhaps come back to us again at a later stage as a result of her inquiries. I am not talking here of some junior officials. Parliamentary draftsmen used to be paid rather more than permanent secretaries and certainly much more than Ministers. Thus the matter really is quite serious. I hope that the Minister will agree—as I say, we fully accept her apologies—none the less to carry out further investigations so that she can tell us, because we have no means of finding out from officials, how this matter arose as it did.
Earl Russell: I thank the Minister very warmly for the trouble she has taken to help us deal with this situation as it has arisen. In particular I should like to thank her for her speaking note, which enables me—I hope—to make sense of what these new amendments are trying to do and to see that they are, as she assures us, innocuous and indeed possibly even rather sensible.
However, that is—as the Italians say when two trains meet at a junction—coincidenza. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, I can recall such things happening before. For example, there was the Social Security Bill in 1990, on which 50 pages of government amendments were tabled on the morning of the first day in Committee. One of those, in my opinion, was so objectionable that I ended up disgracing myself by having the Chamber counted out by dividing against it at 12 midnight, the Minister having resisted my invitation to defer dividing until Report stage. I can say only that I was consoled by the opinion of the Court of Appeal on that matter that the Secretary of State's interpretation of the clause was so unreasonable that Parliament cannot possibly have intended it.
It reminded me of the delightful case of the judge's children who saw crate after crate of champagne being carried into the house and asked, "Mummy, what's that for?". Reply: "Daddy's been upheld in the Appeal Court!". So I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, that the fact that these particular amendments are not ones that we should make a meal of does not mean that this is something that we should accept as being capable of becoming normal practice. It is, after all, Parliament, not parliamentary counsel, that makes the law. It is not my fault that it makes the law.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, has asked questions in the past about the chain of accountability of parliamentary counsel. Those are not our business as a Committee, but they are points that may concern us as individuals in the future. I am sure the Minister will be at one with the rest of us in saying that, however good her own record on this—and it is absolutely excellent and I congratulate her on it—we should not allow the matter to rest. It should not happen, again because next time it might not happen under quite so good a Minister.
Lord Higgins moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 1, line 4, at end insert—
"( ) The provisions of this Act are concerned only with the imposition, repeal, remission, alteration and regulation of taxation or the imposition for financial purposes of charges on the Consolidated Fund or the National Loans Fund."
The noble Lord said: I again thank the Minister for all the help she has given us on the drafting of the various proposals and explaining what they are. From force of habit, whenever I am opposite the noble Baroness I declare an interest as the chairman of a company pension fund. I am not sure whether that is relevant on this Bill, but on every other Bill I have discussed with the Minister it has been.
The amendment is somewhat unusual. I believe the noble Earl, Lord Russell, was under the impression that I would in some way use it to criticise the Speaker.
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