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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

moved Amendment No. 32: After Clause 1, insert the following new clause- ““REMOVAL OF REGULATIONS WITHOUT FULL COMPLIANCE ASSESSMENT If a Minister of the Crown is unable to estimate the average burden in time or cost imposed on persons or businesses affected by a regulation he has introduced, he shall make an order to remove or reduce that regulation.”” The noble Lord said: This amendment looks at the process of assessing the impact of regulations. The regulatory impact assessments that accompany pieces of legislation laid before either House are a useful tool for forecasting where the costs and impacts of policy changes will fall in future. I see from the Cabinet Office website that as at June 2005, there was 100 per cent compliance by government departments with the regulatory impact assessment process. That is fine, as far as it goes. A form of measuring device has been created but that on its own serves no purpose. It is all very well measuring the quantity of a liquid, but the problem is that too often the Government do not check whether the liquid is good whisky or bad poison. The effects of regulation are what matter. Using the device to measure subsequent performance against the original intention will show whether the legislation is having the intended effect. The purpose of the amendment is to put a duty on Ministers to examine the impact of regulations after their introduction. If the assessment is unable to estimate the effect of the regulation, clearly there is no point in the regulation and it has to be removed automatically. I understand that since 2003, the National Audit Office has carried out independent evaluations of regulatory impact assessments. On page 32 of its last report, the Evaluation of Regulatory Impact Assessment Compendium Report 2004-05, it stated that nine out of 10 regulatory impact assessments in its sample, "““discussed monitoring and evaluation but these discussions were very brief and vague””." It went on to state that, "““complex monitoring procedures were sometimes in place but these were not reflected in the regulatory impact assessments””." Will the Minister say whether the National Audit Office’s recommendation that regulatory impact assessments should describe the monitoring process in more detail is being complied with? It is pointless to create regulations and not to examine properly whether they are achieving what was intended. I beg to move.