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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

My Lords, I am not sure that many people in this House this evening will have been able to see the recent production of Arthur Miller’s ““The Crucible”” in London, because clearly everyone has been studying this Bill in greater detail than I can claim to have done. However, I did go last week and I see so many analogies between that play and what happens here. First of all, some silly girls misbehave in the woods and squeak about it in a rather hysterical manner afterwards. Back in town, some citizens see political advantage in making use of this to cry witchcraft. Before long, a major court is established to hear the cries of witchcraft and very soon Salem is on the edge of destruction. In this case, the girls in the wood are the hysterical press commentators, who whipped up an extraordinary storm against this Bill. When it culminated in six silly Cambridge law professors suggesting that somehow Magna Carta was at risk in consequence of it, I thought that we were wholly out of the real world in which some of us like to exist. I am afraid that I feel that the Conservatives made an enormous error, having been rightly and strongly a party of deregulation. After deciding not to vote on this Bill at Second Reading in the Commons, when the Bill was watered down considerably, they then decided to vote against it at a later stage, which I feel was seeking after political advantage. I shall not go further with any analogies with the Salem courts, but I feel that much of the fuss about this Bill has been hugely exaggerated, for reasons I shall explain. I shall go through one or two logical points. First, there is too much regulation in this country. Everyone who has spoken, with the possible exception of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, agrees with that—and certainly I do. Secondly, it is extremely hard to deregulate. That is because civil servants, brought up as they have been in a culture of regulation, see it as cheaper than spending public money—and anyway there is not the Treasury to stop them doing it. They have a predisposition to regulate when faced with a problem. As for industry, it talks with forked tongues. Of course, it is against regulation in general—and you hear all this stuff about £50 billion. But if you look at each specific industry and the regulations that affect it, you usually find that the existing firms in that industry are the strongest defenders of those regulations. Why? Because they act as a tremendous barrier to entry by small firms and outsiders. As for Ministers, they naturally prefer to expend their political capital in doing something rather than undoing something that somebody else has done. So there is a strong difficulty in deregulation, which makes me think that we should be very careful about erecting big parliamentary barriers against doing it. I may delude myself, but I feel that over the past 18 months or so, for the first time deregulation is beginning to get a momentum. A real effort is being made to change Whitehall culture. The five principles dreamed up by the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, in his desk chair are now on every wall in Whitehall. The process is gaining momentum; for example, it is completely inconceivable that the Government would bring forward now the absurd regulations on the control of care homes and their standards that only four years ago they were forced to withdraw when clearly they would have closed most of the care homes in the country. There is an opportunity here, and we must not let an over-concern with the minutiae of how Parliament deals with it stand in the way. I have heard all that has been said about parliamentary procedures. Of course, there is a narrow argument to be had about whether the protections in Clauses 13, 16, 17, 18 and 19—the super-affirmative procedure and all that—are sufficient. They are all there; the Government have given an awful lot. But when it comes down to it, Parliament can stop anything happening that it wants to. It is not confined to voting on the orders that might be involved; it can move to reduce a Minister’s salary or force his resignation, for example. If any Government did what the silly professors said was being done and brought forward a Bill to abolish Magna Carta, abolish jury trials or lock every citizen up for life and all those sorts of things, Parliament would of course stop it, and it would not require the detailed menu for doing so that is the focus of this Bill. There is a school of thought in both Houses that sees the best defence for the respect of Parliament as being to hang on to every power and tradition you have—to ancient traditions and ceremonies. I do not believe that that is going to affect what the British people in the end decide they think of Parliament. What the people want is what we can deliver for them—that is the era in which we live. Deregulation is about delivery—of growth and jobs and, very importantly, of practical freedom to people in how they go about their daily business and run their daily businesses. The Bill may require some adjustment of balance, although most noble Lords may wish to adjust it in a different direction from the one that I would prefer. But it represents a modern approach, whereby we put in due safeguards for Parliament and its rights but they are not allowed to stand in the way of due expedition in getting rid of the onerous regulations that weigh down our society and impede us in many of the ways that make our daily lives less pleasant.