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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, I welcome the Bill and to some extent I am astonished by some of the debates about it. Lawyers live on a high plane of generality and they have a fervid imagination. I served for four years on your Lordships’ Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and, believe me, I know how difficult it is to have a regulation to keep pubs open until midnight—before the present provision was passed. The first order that came before us was to extend the opening of pubs up to midnight for the Golden Jubilee celebrations. Noble Lords should look at page 60 of the excellent report of that committee—I should add that I am not a lawyer; I am an applied economist and I look at evidence first. It turns out that the Regulatory Reform (Golden Jubilee Licensing) Order 2002 took 374 days to pass. My absolute favourite, however, is the Regulatory Reform (Sugar Beet Research and Education) Order 2003 took 1,924 days to pass. When the party opposite talks about cutting red tape and the CBI says that we should cut red tape, they imagine a simple procedure such as Her Majesty the Queen opening an exhibition by cutting a red ribbon. Cutting red ribbons is different from cutting red tapes. This Bill is far from being intended to make grand constitutional changes, like the Magna Carta—and I think that the Magna Carta contained some dubious propositions, but I do not want to go into that. The list of the regulatory reform orders that the Government tried to pass are more than humble; they are extremely simple, ordinary things that we would all like to do. The amount of time and energy that it takes on behalf of all of us, and all the various so-called stakeholder groups who are involved, is so large and costly that people should really find a better way of amending burdensome regulation than we have so far found. The reason why less than half the regulatory reform orders targeted by the Government succeeded in being passed is not that the Government were lazy. You only have to look at the timetable for how long it takes for the simplest thing to go through the consultation procedure—and, when it has gone through that procedure, how often there are unintended consequences and unexpected vested interests that come to testify against, say, keeping pubs open beyond midnight. Then you realise that what we have created for ourselves is a fantastically complicated tangle of even the simplest regulations. We do not have a simple red tape to cut but a spaghetti junction of red tape. Therefore, we must seriously find a way in which to do something drastic about this. As always, the noble Lord will interrupt.