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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, that exactly illustrates my point. If you cannot even keep pubs open one hour beyond their original closing hour on one day in 50 years, what is the hope of cutting any red tape at all? As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said, we all want to do efficient things and cut red tape but, as soon as the Government try to do anything, they say, ““Ah, we’re not going to let you do anything like that. We’ll have to do it in the House and spend lots of time on it—and we much prefer primary legislation to regulatory orders because we don’t trust you””. Then, of course, the same people say that governments legislate too much. Why do they legislate too much? Because it has become very difficult to do the simplest thing through regulatory reform orders. While I welcome the Bill, I feel that it does not go far enough, not in terms of the constitutional safeguards and all that; that will only make the problem more entangled and less likely to be effective. Everything that has been said so far will make red tape more difficult to cut, although it will allow you not to have the Magna Carta amended, the probability of which under any Government is negligible. We are putting up safeguards against remote possibilities and not looking at the realities on the ground where we are creating obstacles for ourselves in making simple changes. I welcome what the Government said about the veto. I do not know whether we can greatly shorten the consultation procedure, but once a regulatory reform order has been presented, its passage would be greatly expedited if we were satisfied that it could be scrutinised by a committee of your Lordships’ House or of another place, that the committee could occasionally recommend non-acceptance of the order, and as long as the House can approve it. What people are telling me now is that most of the suggestions are constitutionally very fine and noble and will no doubt make many lawyers very happy but that they will not speed up the efficient elimination of burdensome regulation. I therefore suggest that we should look at what regulatory reform orders have already been proposed and why it has been so difficult to pass them. What has taken the maximum time in passing them? Rather than worrying about the likely constitutional consequence of the Government getting away with murder, let us consider how little the Government were trying to change and how difficult it was for them to do even that. The sugar beet research corporation should have been abolished 50 years before. It should never have been started. But it took us 2,000 days to discuss a very simple administrative change. We have to leave the lofty heights of constitutional procedure and come back to the ground where we are creating a state in which it will become impossible not only for businesses but for ordinary people to operate because regulation is extremely burdensome and very difficult to remove.