LORDS AMENDMENTS (Hansard, 30 October 1975)

§ Lord BESWICK
My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth not insist on its Amendments Nos. 62 to 68 to which the Commons have disagreed for the Reason numbered 69. I wonder whether with Amendments Nos. 62 to 68 and the Commons Reason numbered 69we could also take Amendment No. 70 and the Commons Amendment No. 71.
My Lords, all these Amendments arise on the issue of whether the independent committee considering whether disclosure of information would cause injury to the 663 undertaking concerned should be an advisory committee, or a committee with the power of decision. It is a matter which was debated at some length at Committee stage in another place. The view which the Government now take, that the committee should be advisory rather than one of decision, is the opposite of the view that they first took. It was in large measure as a result of views strongly pressed by the Opposition in that Committee that the Government moved to the view that it should be an advisory body. I recognise, of course, that the noble Lords who pressed this Amendment were concerned about independence of judgment. But this solution brings grave drawbacks.
It would be a quite unusual constitutional arrangement, to give an administrative tribunal such as is provided for in Schedule 5 power to overrule a Minister. The tribunal would be answerable to nobody for its decisions. When the Government originally proposed that the Minister should have no power of decision on this point, and that it should be wholly the province of a tribunal, there was the very strongest pressure for provision for rights of appeal to the courts against the decisions of the tribunal. We then came back to the idea of an advisory committee.
The Amendment, in lieu of our Amendment No. 70, which we are also discussing, broadly restores the Bill to the form in which it was at the end of our Committee stage, and also incorporates a few further minor drafting Amendments which I had tabled for Report stage, but which I was not able to move because they conflicted with the decision of the House on that occasion in favour of an appeal committee. I hope that on balance noble Lords will think that we have come back to the right solution. I beg to move.

Lord CAMPBELL of CROY
My Lords, I agree that it would be convenient to have one debate on all these Amendments, and I recognise that that 664 means that we can only speak once upon them. The effect is that the Minister is to retain a final decision after the procedure has been engaged when an objection has been raised by a company (which all of us will hope will occur only on rare occasions), but it means that the Minister virtually has the last word. We were worried about this, and we thought that the series of Amendments that we put forward with the noble Lords, Lord Rochester and Lord Wigoder, would have been a better system, particularly as we know that the safeguards that were introduced by the Government were introduced hurriedly in another place at the Report stage, and there was no real opportunity for the other place to go into this.
For example, the only check on the Minister, when the Committee is to be an advisory one and not an appeals committee, is to be the Negative Resolution procedure. As I understand it, the effect of the Amendments is to bring that back again. That is a procedure which is well known to both this House and another place, but we believe that it is out of place here as a Parliamentary check on a Minister because the subject matter is confidential. The dispute is about whether or not certain information should be passed to trade union representatives and for reasons that arc given in the Bill, either because of injury to the company or because of breach of confidence, the company is objecting. Therefore, the debates that would take place in this House and in another place would be on information which is still protected as confidential, and quite rightly. Therefore, it is exceedingly difficult to see how orderly or informed debates could take place under the Negative Resolution procedure.
While that procedure is a traditional one, which we know and accept in appropriate cases, it seems wholly incongruous in the context of this Bill. That is why we, and other noble Lords, devised what we thought would be a complete and rather better system for an appeals committee, because this seemed the kind of subject where a trusted independent body should be given the job of going into all this behind closed doors, because the appeals commitee would have been privy to the information, they could discuss it all behind closed doors, and if 665 they were not given all the information they could be given quite a bit of it because that was not making it public.
We had hoped that the disturbance to the Government's Bill was minimal in devising the set of Amendments. We had that in mind. The original suggestion which we made from the Conservative Benches here for a tribunal we dropped, because we recognised that although that was based on other legislation it would have caused more upheaval to the Bill. I must express our regret that something which was quite nonpolitical, and entirely an effort to help the Government with something they did hurriedly at Report stage in another place, should not have found favour, because we think that when cases come up before the advisory committee, and when the Minister takes a decision and we then have debates in this House and another place, we shall find it exceedingly difficult when we do not know what the information is, and only told broadly the nature of it. It would have been better to have had an appeals committee who could be trusted to go into all this and then give a verdict.

§ Lord WIGODER
My Lords, this group of Amendments in their present form emanated from these Benches. They were put forward in an entirely non-partisan spirit. They were supported by the noble Lord, Lord Brown, from the Government Benches when the House was in Committee, and supported by various noble Lords on the Cross-Benches when the Division was taken on Report stage. They were simply an attempt to deal with an extremely cumbrous piece of machinery and to try to improve it. It seemed to us that there was something quite preposterous about the proposal that the final decision as to whether information would cause substantial injury to an undertaking should be taken on the Floor of your Lordships' House, or on the Floor of the other place, after a debate in which nobody was allowed to know the nature of the information concerned.
I can say no more than that we are deeply concerned that the proposals which your Lordships' House approved have now disappeared. I hope that the noble 666 Lord, Lord Beswick, will forgive me if I say that we are even more concerned about the way in which they have disappeared, because, having met with support from all parts of your Lordships' House, they went back to the other place, they were taken under the guillotine, and there was no debate or discussion of them at all. It seems to be quite deplorable that the legislative chaos in another place should be such that they are beginning to equal their unrepresentative nature by the inefficiency in the way in which they conduct their proceedings.

§ Lord BESWICK
My Lords, I am sorry that towards the end of our deliberations the language is getting stronger. I do not believe that the word "preposterous" is merited here. Both the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, and the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, were saying that the discussion in Parliament on a matter of this kind would be inadequate, but it would be far more adequate than discussion in camera before an appeals committee which had the final say. There is no chaos here. I can imagine that there may be other parts of the Bill, even other Amendments, which are so complicated and so inadequately discussed that the noble Lord might mount a case, but not here. The issue is quite simple: with whom should the last word lie. We believe it should lie with the Minister, who can be challenged in Parliament. Although some of the details will not be available to the House, I think that the House has a sufficient sense in these matters to realise whether or not a Minister of the Crown is behaving in an impartial fashion. I beg to move.