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Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

My Lords, Amendment No. 65 can be regarded as benign in the context of the Government’s approach, but the Government’s approach is to take the maximum power for themselves in almost any circumstances and to give that to every regulator. The Government are speaking with forked tongue, because at one point they say they will be proportionate but at the next they say that it is important to capture any profit and to be an effective deterrent. Courts can perfectly well understand these things, but they stand back, are independent, and look at them in the context of ordinary life in this country. Now it is being taken to a group of specialists and to a system where you are found guilty and you incur the penalty. You can even run up costs for not paying the penalty on time because it continues to run, it seems, unless and until an appeal tribunal suspends it temporarily, which it may or may not do, and you may or not understand. One of the difficulties for the Opposition when a Bill goes so fundamentally against what we understand as the normal principles of justice is that one cannot really rewrite it sensibly by amendments. My noble friend has raised some very important points. I go back to my plea for the Government to think very carefully about this whole area and whether it is not wiser to go to the courts. I had certainly understood from other answers in other debates, both in Committee and on Report, that the Government were saying that the most egregious and serious cases should probably go to the courts, but now the Minister wants absolutely unlimited powers, to be dealt with by the regulators. We have still not heard a sensible explanation for how a system that currently works 99 per cent in the magistrates’ court and less than 1 per cent in the Crown Court will be divided up, as the Minister put it, roughly into 60 per cent administrative penalties and 40 per cent for the courts. I am amazed that no principle seems to exist for determining which cases will go to the courts, which will be administrative penalties, which will be—massively—variable penalties, which will be fixed penalties, or how much the fixed penalties will be. The Government have just not answered those questions. I hope they will reflect further.