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Government Regulation

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for a powerful intervention. However, if I were to assert that there were nits in the House, it might be deemed unparliamentary language, so I shall not go any further down that route. Nine different forms have to be filled in before a teacher can take children on a school trip and, if a swimming pool visit is involved, another two are added. I shall not read the forms out, but they are bizarre in their detail and complexity. Of course, teachers should need permission and should behave reasonably—I am sure that they do—but they should not need to fill in nine forms. The regulations are becoming an impediment to organising trips and it is easier not to bother. Then there are regulations that achieve the opposite of what was intended. The common fisheries policy is perhaps the best and biggest example of that. In the name of conservation, fishermen are told that they have to hurl dead fish back into the sea if they catch the wrong kind of fish. That means that they have to go and catch more of the right kind of fish for people to eat, instead of being able to sell the dead fish and avoid having to rape the seabed further. That is madness. The Government must recognise that and should use some of their influence in Brussels to achieve a fundamental revision of the CFP or repatriate the policy, as the Conservatives would wish to do. Then there are regulations that miss the target. The Government’s policy for tackling road accidents and deaths—an important issue—has been based almost entirely on the control of speed. They have not been deterred by the fact that fewer than one in 10 of all accidents on the road has speed as a prime or important cause and they have ignored all the evidence that shows that many dangerous accidents occur well below the maximum speed limit at junctions with a conflict of traffic and different types of users on the same road space. Because the policy rested on speed cameras, we had a reversal in the trend for several years and road deaths started going up again. I am pleased that figures for the most recent year show an overall fall, but in the area most dependent on speed cameras—north Wales—the trend in deaths and serious accidents has continued to rise. The Government should consider that and accept that their single over-regulated policy is not working, because it does not tackle the causes of the problem.