§ 3.23 p.m.
§ LORD SILKEN rose to call attention to the Report from the Special Orders Committee, dated the 3rd December, 1952; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order paper. For some months now this House has been engaged in the consideration of matters of high national and international importance and it is perhaps appropriate that immediately before we rise for the Christmas Recess we should direct our attention to a domestic affair with a view to satisfying ourselves that we are running our own business as efficiently as we can. Your Lordships will remember that last Tuesday week we discussed the Police Pensions Regulations in connection with which there was a Report from the Special Orders Committee. Your Lordships will recollect that the regulations were admittedly unsatisfactory in the way in which they were presented: they purported to amend non-existent regulations, and they were the subject of somewhat caustic observations from the Special Orders Committee. With considerable reluctance this House agreed to those regulations, on the assurance, which I do not for a moment dispute, that if they were not passed the police would suffer in consequence by not being able to get their benefits by Christmas. That was putting the House in a very invidious position. On the one hand, we had these really unsatisfactory regulations which, if the House had had a free hand, I am convinced it would not have passed. On the other hand, we were being told that unless we did pass them a very worthy body of men and women would suffer. Naturally, we accepted the lesser of the two evils and we approved the regulations. I do not want to dwell on that incident further. I hope that the Home Office will never again produce regulations of that kind in this House, and I believe they have learned their lesson.
§ The discussion that we had on that occasion opened the question of the work of the Special Orders Committee, and it is with a view to giving the House an opportunity of considering the work of that Committee in relation to statutory instruments that I have put this Motion down. The Special Orders Committee, like many 1058 other Committees, are unobtrusive and do their work very quietly; very little is seen or heard of them so long as things go smoothly and well. There is no doubt that they have rendered a great service to this House in producing their Report of December 3 last. In consequence of that, I thought it right to examine how this Committee were set up, and what work they do. I find that the Committee are constituted under Rule 214 of the Standing Orders Relative to Private Bills. The first thing that strikes one on reading that Rule is that, contrary to what one would believe—certainly contrary to what I believed, namely, that the Special Orders Committee examined all statutory instruments that came before the House and expressed a view on them all—all they examine are those instruments which require an Affirmative Resolution of the House. Those number, possibly, 10 to 15 per cent. of the total. Therefore, so far as 80 to 85 per cent. of the statutory instruments which are presented are concerned, there is no examination by any committee at all. That is a most significant fact relative to the question of Parliamentary control. It is true that, as regards the others, the 80 to 85 per cent., it is open to any noble Lord to put down a Prayer with a view to negativing the statutory instrument. But, seeing that we get, as I have said before, some 2,000 a year of those, it is a rather tall order, and it is not really physically possible for any noble Lord to devote himself to the task of examining every one of those regulations. That is the first point that strikes one.
§
The second is that the powers of the Special Orders Committee are extremely limited. What are they asked to do? They are asked to examine orders which require an Affirmative Resolution from three points of view:
Whether the provisions raise important questions of policy or principle; how far the order is founded on precedent; whether having regard to the answers to the two preceding questions and to any other relevant circumstances, the order can he passed by the House without special attention …
That is a useful power which enables the Committee to draw the attention of the House to orders requiring Affirmative Resolutions which need the consideration of the House. But it does not go very far. It does not give the House any guidance. I should like to strengthen the powers of this Committee. I know that
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the Chairman is not particularly anxious to have these powers extended, but I feel that if the Special Orders Committee are really to be of service to this House, their powers ought to be extended so that they can give further guidance, and, if necessary, in the case of an instrument coming before them such as the one which related to police, even send it back to the Department and call for something which is more intelligible. Now they have no power to do that. All they can do is to direct the attention of the House to these three points that I have mentioned.
§ There is another factor in the matter, and that is the time factor to which I have referred indirectly. We were placed in a very great dilemma on the occasion of the Police Regulations, but I understand that it is the practice of many Departments to present their instruments in such a way that an inadequate amount of time is given, either to the Special Orders Committee or to this House itself. I refer to the Police Regulations because the matter arises as the result of what happened. But in that case I, as, I hope, a fairly normal and diligent member of this House, had my attention drawn to these regulations only on the morning of the day on which they came before the House. It may be that with a good deal of research one might conceivably have discovered them a day or so earlier. But this House is not given much time in these matters, and frequently the Special Orders Committee are not given sufficient time properly to examine these instruments and to give them the consideration which they ought to receive. I suggest that some timetable might be laid down in the Rules which would require a Department to deposit with the Special Orders Committee any instrument for which they required approval, sufficiently early to provide a certain amount of time for consideration both in the Committee and in the House. This is, of course, only part of a much bigger question, and that is the whole question of effective Parliamentary control over statutory instruments, but it is a very important part of it. Even this 10 to 15 per cent. of the statutory instruments is a substantial part, and I 1060 imagine that, by and large, it does constitute the more important of the instruments that are made by the various Departments.
§ There is just one other matter to which I should like to refer in connection with these Rules and that is, as I have said, that they were made about twenty years ago. If the noble Viscount who is to reply reads them, he will find that they are somewhat out of date. They relate to matters which no longer obtain to-day, and on reading these Rules it is a little difficult to find which are applicable at the present time and which are not. Here again, as in the case of the regulations of which we disposed yesterday, I would suggest that the time may well have come for a new edition of these Standing Orders, cutting out those parts that have become archaic and bringing the whole thing up to date. My intention in putting this Motion down was simply to initiate a discussion. I do not propose to press Her Majesty's Government for Papers. Indeed, I do not know what Papers I really want.
§ LORD SILKINBut I did think it was a suitable subject for discussion as the last business before the Christmas Recess. I beg to move for Papers.