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Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, leave out ““Local Better”” and insert ““Better Local”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the name proposed for the new quango to be established by the Bill is misleading to the point of falsehood. The name proposed in my Amendment No. 1 is the minimum required in the interests of truth. This office should not really be called the Local Better Regulation Office; it should be called the National Office for Regulating Local Government Regulators—or something of that sort. That is its purpose and what it is going to do. The body is not local but national. As a test of that, imagine oneself sitting in an office somewhere, picking up the telephone and somebody on the other end saying, ““I am from the Local Better Regulation Office””. Would you suppose that he or she came from a local or national office? You would assume at once that they came from something local. That proves the point I am trying to make. The formulation in the amendment was suggested in Committee by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. It is the minimum rather than the ultimately desirable and I put it forward on that basis. I do not consider myself a pedant, although I realise that no pedant ever does. I am a disciple of Lynne Truss and was a disciple of Sir Ernest Gower, who wrote an excellent book on plain words. The Civil Service guide to clear English was written in about 1948 but lasted a long time in Civil Service circles; I do not whether it is still used. The name should be made clearer. Perhaps the body should be called the ““Temporary National Regulator””. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Jones, is not with us. He described it as a temporary body and said that it would all be wound up before long. No doubt we shall hear about that on a later amendment. This is not a quango but a tango. The noble Lord, Lord Jones, has looked in occasionally, a bit like the Cheshire Cat. He comes and grins at us from time to time, then fades away again, leaving somebody else to move the amendments in his name. It is important that we describe things correctly. The Bill does not do so. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, was kind enough to remind me in correspondence that all we are doing here is putting on a statutory basis something that is already done voluntarily to a considerable extent. Yet there is a world of difference between something done voluntarily and something done statutorily, particularly for the local authorities whose powers are in effect being taken away or certainly impinged on. At present, both the primary authority and the local authorities involved must agree. In future, that will all be laid down. Later amendments, notably my Amendment No. 39, attempt to remedy this. The difference is that, when a dispute arises, ultimately the matter, if it is statutory, can come to the courts to decide in a way that it could not if it was voluntary. There could be appeals all the way up to what we should call the Middlesex Guildhall by the time this gets going. Putting this on a statutory basis is one thing; we can discuss that in later amendments. Yet the body is really a national office and we should recognise that at a minimum by accepting Amendment No. 1. I beg to move.