Clause 62 - Commencement
Animal Welfare Bill
1:45 pm
Norman Baker (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Lewes, Liberal Democrat)
This comes back to the issue that we have touched upon on some occasions and skirted around on others, namely the extent to which the Bill is an enabling Bill; indeed, the matter was referred to in the previous exchange. To what extent can we expect the Government’s promises to be delivered and within what time scale?
I hope that the Minister will accept that Members in all parts of the Committee have taken him on trust when he has promised to do certain things that we all want. In exchange for that we have provided the Government with powers. However, as part of that exchange there has been no guarantee—nor perhaps could there be with an enabling Bill—that those powers will be introduced.
Clause 62 states that only three clauses will come into effect on day one. They are clause 55, which just says that Ministers can do something, clause 61, which just specifies the extent of their powers, and clause 63, which gives the title—it is good to the know that the Bill has a title, but there nothing else in clause 63. Nothing in the rest of clause 62 specifies a date or a time scale for any of the secondary legislation by which we all set so much store and which might otherwise not be introduced.
As hon. Members will know from previous legislation, there is a litany of cases down the ages in which promises about secondary legislation have been made as part of enabling legislation, but that secondary legislation has not appeared. The first Act that I remember working on as a researcher was the Environmental Protection Act 1990. There are provisions in that Act which have still not been introduced 16 years on, even though there was cross-party agreement on them.
The Bill contains an enabling power, and the Minister is on record as saying that those powers will be introduced through secondary legislation, but that does not guarantee that those powers will be introduced. Suppose, for example, that the Government have a change of philosophy, that the Minister changes and the new Ministers takes a different view, or that there is a change of Government. All sort of things can happen to derail the process on which we have all agreed so far.
As a quid pro quo, in exchange for our agreeing to significant enabling powers, the Minister ought to be prepared to specify something in the way of an enactment date for those powers. I fully accept that the regulatory impact assessment sets out a timetable for regulations and codes. It goes up to 2010, with performing animals as the last entry. Of course, the Minister will readily recognise that that is not legally binding and therefore, in a sense, is no more of a guarantee than his words. I do not wish to be pejorative or insulting. I am just saying that the timetable is not a legal guarantee, any more than what is said in this room. There is no guarantee that things will follow on. The Minister will know that the EFRA Committee and others have raised considerable concerns about the use of secondary powers. If we are to rely heavily on those secondary powers, at the very least we need some guarantee as to when they will come in.
Amendments Nos. 45 and 46, in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-West, would set a time scale by inserting the phrase
“within 3 years following the passage of this Act”.
That would give us some guarantee of when the powers would come in. The Minister may say that that is unrealistic and it will take five years to deal with performing animals, or whatever amount of time he has set out in the regulatory impact assessment. That is fair enough. If he wants to say that it will take five years, or even eight years, that is fine, but we want an assurance that all the good work that we have done on the Bill—we are now coming to the end of it—will be put into practice and that all the things that we have agreed should happen will actually happen. One way of achieving that is to include in the Bill some sort of requirement that it occurs. If the Minister is committed to animal welfare, as I know he is, it is in his interests to ensure that that happens, rather than see the good work that he has done disappear off into the distance.