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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

The quality and value of the speech that we have just heard makes me regret that the noble Viscount was not here on the first day of Committee. I suppose that the amendment is meant to be taken seriously but it is rather frivolous in its consequences. I suppose that it could be a probing amendment but I am not sure what it is probing. I do not think that having in a Bill a target of a 10 per cent reduction in the number of regulations established under legislation and so on is what Hampton or the Better Regulation Task Force, or whatever it is now called, had in mind at all. As the noble Viscount indicated, the duty would have astonishing consequences in a short period of time if a department had to comply with subsection (2). As for publishing a list of all regulations, the noble Viscount has already pointed out the ambiguity surrounding those regulations. Is the amendment referring to legislation in general, as is dealt with in Clause 1, including subordinate legislation? As for ““burdens””, almost every conceivable piece of legislation can be described as a burden. To be serious for a moment, surely we must accept that, whatever its faults, the Bill is concerned with continuing what was begun in 1994 when Her Majesty's Opposition were in government to reduce the burden of regulation on business and so on. One wants the Bill to be more effective than the previous one, from which arose a considerable spate of deregulatory orders, in order to reduce the burden that I have just described. Asking departments to publish lists of regulations seems to me to serve no useful purpose, and it is rather surprising that Her Majesty's Opposition should think that this is an amendment of value.