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Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

I understand. It will be very important that local authorities, the regulators in this field, do not abuse their position, and we shall be watching very closely to ensure that they do not. You can be quite sure that the businesses will be watching very closely, along with their representatives. In most cases now, as the noble and learned Lord is saying, regulators use their discretion and good sense to know when to prosecute and when not to. There is no reason to believe that they will not do the same when one of the sanctions available is a fixed monetary penalty. One of Macrory’s points was that the only alternative to prosecuting someone through the courts, with all the costs involved for the person being prosecuted in a minor case, was to do nothing about it at all, and sometimes that would be the wrong thing to do. It calls for the regulator’s good judgment. You cannot always rely on that, which is why the safeguards that we have referred to many times this afternoon are in place. I am advised that regulators will have to act in compliance with principles of good regulation in a targeted and proportionate way; if they do not, they will be subject to very severe criticism.