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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I should first apologise to the Grand Committee; I completely forgot to say that I am a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, to which the Minister referred, but my views go rather beyond what was in its report. What I have said and will say is my personal view, not the view of the committee. I remain in a difficulty. The problem is that we are discussing two completely separate things. I come to the practical one first. I quite understand that there will need to be conversations and leverage of some sort—there is plenty about, of course—if things are not going as well with the regulator as the Secretary of State considers that they should or if the Secretary of State identifies improvements that the regulator could make. No one can have any objection to there being a proper dialogue, guidance or whatever. It is the words ““must comply”” which provide the difficulty. That means that in a state of disagreement, the regulator must comply, because he will have received a direction. The second issue is completely different. It concerns the relationship between secondary regulation and the power of direction as used by Secretaries of State and the relationship with Parliament. As with orders, Parliament gets the opportunity to scrutinise, not on a website, but in a legal document, what is being proposed. It also has the chance to debate either by prayer to annul or needing an affirmative resolution what is written in that legal document. Everybody then knows that it has really been thought through and that it has been the subject of parliamentary scrutiny so that the opinions and prospective opinions of Parliament have been taken into account before the order was laid. This is not so with directions, and that is why directions, which are subject to no parliamentary scrutiny or procedure, have always been reserved for particular uses, not for general use. While I have the greatest respect for the positive report of the noble Lord, Lord Best—I understand about progress on the practical matters and I welcome it—it does not go to the point of the formality of receiving a direction which must be complied with but which has not been subjected to parliamentary scrutiny in any form. If I may say so, that is a different issue. I remain of the opinion that what is set out in Clause 195 could be achieved by perfectly acceptable means within the relationship between the regulator and the Secretary of State, but should not be achieved by directions. That is my position and I am certain that in one way or another I shall return to the matter. Clause 195, as amended, agreed to.