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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

I am most grateful to the Minister. I submit that his example is not a good one. It is plain that the firm in question already has the burden of responding to the demands of the external regulator. Simply shifting the time that it takes the firm to respond to external demands by requiring it to self-assess may not reduce the burden at all; it may be a net increase on the individual firm. The fact that it must do it itself is no comfort if it takes more time to regulate itself than for an outsider to regulate it. What concerns me, and what lies behind the amendment, is that under the order-making powers here, a Minister can identify an individual who carried no responsibility for a particular activity before—and therefore carried no burden with respect to it—draw them in and land them with responsibilities that he or she never had before. That is wholly inappropriate to an order-making power of this sort. I wanted the Minister to say that, of course, there would be no circumstances in which such a burden could be imposed on such a person. From the expression on his face, I suspect that he is not prepared to give me that undertaking.