---

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

I oppose the amendments in this group. At Second Reading, the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, rightly said of the Bill that, "““its potential benefit and effectiveness are hard to predict, since they are reliant on the political will of Ministers to take advantage of the Bill's powers and use them effectively””.—[Official Report, 13/6/06; col. 130.]" The basis of the Bill is to make some advance—although we have already had some discussion on how much advance it makes—on the 2001 Act to remove regulatory burdens. We shall have full discussions on what that means. It seems to me that the initial lead must come from Ministers; it must be based on the fact that the Minister considers that such-and-such regulatory burdens should be removed. Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, has pointed out, because of his amendment to a later clause, a number of preconditions have to be satisfied before these powers can be used. I fully agree with—although I am not bound to—the legal interpretation of the noble Lord relating to judicial review. Without going into the detail, I accept his point that the test, as it stands at the moment—““he considers”” and so on—is not fully objective. I see the noble Lord nods in agreement. I think that that point is right. If the test were fully objective and we had, as it were, full scope for judicial review every time that the Minister wanted to remove regulatory burdens, that would seem to elevate judicial accountability over political accountability. That would be quite inappropriate to this matter, on which I believe that the Minister must take the lead, must take political responsibility and must account to the media and to Parliament for what he is doing. I think that the amendment would unduly hobble the Minister's efforts to do what people on all sides of the House suggested at Second Reading is desirable; namely, be effective in removing regulatory burdens.