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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, I support the Bill and, rather controversially this afternoon, I would probably have supported the original Bill, at least in large part. Although I recognise some of the points that have been made about safeguards, I take a rather different approach from some noble Lords in relation to regulation. If I were strictly accurate, I would probably have to declare a large number of past and present interests because I have been a proponent of more legislation and more regulation in a number of respects, from workers’ rights through to environmental legislation, animal welfare and, currently, consumer rights. I make no apology for that because part of being in government is to regulate. I also recognise that on our statute book and in our enforcement culture we have had a substantial amount of bad regulation and bad enforcement practices arising from that regulation. Despite the efforts of this House under successive governments, that also applies to primary legislation. Much primary legislation is badly conceived and much of it, including recent primary legislation, has not been as well drafted as it should be, to put it mildly. By bad regulation, I do not necessarily mean bad in motive or objective, nor do I necessarily mean bad in terms of the costs that are imposed on business, as in some areas we need to make bad practice more expensive. I am not even talking primarily about red-tape costs, although I accept that argument. I was the Minister in Defra who set the target for cutting red-tape costs by 25 per cent and I am in favour of generalising that across government. Primarily, what I mean by bad regulation is unclear, conflicting, technically outdated, over-prescriptive, disproportionate regulation and, above all, regulation that is incomprehensible to the average expert, let alone to the average layman. Therefore, as a result of all those faults, it is ineffective and not cost-effective regulation. I am clearly in favour of better regulation, not necessarily less regulation. We have been regulating for some considerable time. Consumer protection legislation goes back to the Middle Ages. I declare my chairmanship of the National Consumer Council, although neither I nor the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, was present when weights and measures legislation first came in. We have been legislating on health and safety for 200 years, on the protection of workers for about the same period and on environmental protection for about 100 years. But in the past four or five decades, the pace has increased hugely and the parliamentary process still uses procedures that were established largely in the Victorian era. Contrary to what is sometimes alleged in this House, in this country there is a vast amount of parliamentary scrutiny compared with many other jurisdictions, both of Anglo-Saxon and of Roman provenance. Of late, much more is placed on the face of primary legislation than is the case in other jurisdictions; indeed, much of our secondary legislation would be regarded as administrative or tertiary law in many parts of the world. I am not advocating any change to that system, but the implication of pursuing that means that there is an enormous workload on Parliament, on parliamentary draftsmen and, in particular, on this House which makes scrutiny a centre of its endeavours. Dealing all the time with new proposals for legislation, many of which have wide support, there is a tendency to squeeze out serious consideration of the efficacy of existing legislation and the way in which that legislation is enforced. We have a situation in which minor issues on the face of a Bill cannot be changed without virtually the full primary legislative procedure. My noble friend Lord Desai referred to one or two in regard to the regulatory reform orders. I, as Minister, was faced with a situation in which we could not change the way in which Kew Gardens charged entrance fees without going through primary legislation and my noble friend Lord Desai referred to how it took us 2,000 days to abolish the beet sugar research corporation. It is nonsense that this House should have to go through the full procedure to make those minor changes. We also seem to be incapable of producing consolidation legislation. Almost everyone out there asks, ““Where is the Act that governs my business, my area of interest, my activity?””, and yet, every piece of new legislation or new regulation with which we deal is actually only the top strata of some archaeological structure that amends the previous Act which itself amends the one before, and so on, ad infinitum. Yesterday, to great praise, and certainly with my support, the Solicitor-General announced that the Government will try to make new laws clearer and in everyday English. As long as the structure of the legislation is there like that, however, then there is a difficulty in conveying what that legislation is trying to do. We have made various attempts to try to rationalise this situation. The creation of the Law Commission was one such attempt, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, has pointed out its effectiveness and the fact that it has a huge backlog. I do not follow him to his conclusion, but we should recognise that the Government and Parliament must take the Law Commission’s work more seriously. There are all those outstanding measures on which they have made detailed recommendations. I have mentioned consolidation. There are understandable demands for consolidation elsewhere, some of them based on Law Commission reports, where the work has effectively already been done. Yet Parliament cannot find time to deal with them. Regulatory reform orders were hailed as a great breakthrough—