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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, compared with the number of areas in which it would be beneficial for us to have consolidated legislation, there are relatively few that go through in that form. They have to be totally consensual. The problem with even consolidating legislation is that some past controversies re-emerge. Yet we would not be changing the law; we would simply be simplifying it and presenting it in one place. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, has sat in on the proceedings of the Company Law Reform Bill, as I have from time to time. It is producing the longest piece of legislation we have ever had in this country, apart from Finance Bills, and is taking almost the longest time to go through Committee here and in another place. Even when we look at alternatives to prescriptive legislation—economic and market measures, of which I thoroughly approve—we must go into further, new and more simplified regulation. To deliver a lot of consumer protection, for example, we need more competition, but we need the regulation to provide the OFT with the powers so to intervene. We need to update the role of the OFT and other competition authorities from time to time. Where we are, as a result of privatisation or the liberalisation of a market, trying to create an initially artificial market, we need new regulations to deal with that. As the market develops, we will need to change those regulations and relieve some of their more burdensome aspects, which must be done rapidly and flexibly. Parliament does not really have the procedure to do that. When we are changing institutions, the Hampton report has been referred to as how we should consolidate the number of regulators into six or seven main ones. To do that takes an unconscionably long time, however. The noble Lord, Lord Haskins, who is due to speak shortly, made proposals about rural delivery a few years ago. They met almost universal approval, yet are still going through Parliament for us to create a single organisation in one relatively small area of rural regulation. Even economic regulators, about which a number of noble Lords have spoken, need to adapt to the market, and Parliament and Ministers must make further adjustments to their role. I declare my membership of Ofwat’s board, although I am not speaking as a board member today. I recognise that it needs economic certainty to a greater degree than other areas but I would not entirely support its exclusion from Part 1 of the Bill, though I would look on slightly more safeguards in that area with favour. I said at the beginning that I would have been a supporter of a wider Bill. That is because we could only use this accelerated, simplified procedure in areas where we were relieving a burden, which must be fairly specifically defined in the Bill. There will be other areas, however, in which rationalisation of past regulation is extremely desirable, where the burden may not be that obvious; the burden of the ministry of inconvenience could be extended. Were we, in my previous area of concern, to go for a programme of rationalising agricultural regulation, that might not relieve the total burden on farmers, but it would make life a lot easier if they were dealing with one regulator, one system of regulation and one whole-farm approach to agricultural planning. As regards environmental regulation, which will face us soon and is one of my major concerns, we must consider what we will need to do on climate change. We will need to adapt very rapidly not just to whether market measures and past regulations work, but also to what is happening physically to our environment. We took 2,000 days to abolish the beet sugar research corporation, but we cannot afford to take that period of time to introduce the rationalisation or improvement of regulations relating to the environmental challenges that face us. This House has a problem. We rightly believe in greater scrutiny, but we also believe in more effective government. We need to look at other ways of achieving that, which may be different from those the Bill prescribes; I do not think it is the last word on this subject. We need a bit of imagination and innovation about how our procedures and processes can deliver the change that government and society require without the lengthy procedures and unnecessarily detailed period of scrutiny that we go through. The noble Lord, Lord Holme, referred to looking overall at the performance of regulators. That may be part of the solution, but unless we face up to the fact that our apparently constitutional insistence on old forms of scrutiny cannot deliver modern government that responds to market, environmental and social developments, the kind of regulations that everybody is deeply opposed to will remain on the statute book. They are a cost to business and eventually to consumers and may be dangerous to society as a whole.