Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

May I begin as everybody else will begin by praising the policy intention behind the Bill? I very much doubt whether there is any right hon. or hon. Member, either present or elected to this House, who does not support the principle of deregulation. We all acknowledge the tremendous pressure that we are under to reverse the inexorable growth of regulation in recent years and the constant reminder we are given by British business about its damaging effects on our competitiveness, so this ought to be a non-controversial Bill. It is a minor miracle that the Government have succeeded in turning it into an extremely controversial piece of legislation. I agree with the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher) that there is no point in going back now, but I cannot understand why the Government thought that they could carry general support for deregulation into support for a Bill of the kind that they first drafted. New clause 19 is indeed extremely welcome. It is the first time that the Government have moved substantially from where they started. The original Bill was drafted in an extraordinary fashion; parliamentary procedure would have been bypassed on every kind of occasion if a Government were minded to do so. New clause 19 has sought to narrow that, but it still has not gone far enough. The Government are still not inclined to restrict their scope sufficiently to reassure me that there is not the danger, perhaps a few years hence, that the provision will be misused and in a way that would further erode the power of this Parliament to check the activities of the Executive. In light of recent history, that is something of which we in this House should always be conscious. The best point made by the new Minister, whom I welcome to his post and who did his best to get back to common sense on deregulation, was that there is a danger that we will all be so sensitive about parliamentary procedure that we will become extremely pedantic and Governments will again find that their deregulatory legislation is quite inadequate for anything except making such minor changes as to be of no consequence to anyone. I tell myself—and I hope that everybody else will in this debate—that one must guard against that before looking at new clause 19 and saying that it is not adequate. However, I have done that and I still think that whoever produced the new clause has been too cautious. Proposed subsection (3) leaves open the possibility of the repeal of any kind of taxation in response to demands from pressure groups and commercial lobbies. Procedures made illegal by the criminal law could be legalised, and debate prevented by the fast-track procedure. I cited the example of the repeal of the climate change levy, because I thought that the proposal might attract the Minister’s interest. Conservative Members support that repeal— presumably, he is not favour of the measure—and there is nothing in the Bill to prevent the Government from introducing it. The Bill could be used to provide an exemption to value added tax on goods or services in response to a well publicised and financed commercial lobby. VAT has become nonsense because so many exemptions have been allowed over the years for political purposes. Plenty of people would argue that their goods or services are so desirable that an exemption is the obvious thing to provide. It would be easier to give way to them, if any Government are so minded, by using the legislation. Airport passenger tax, insurance duty and all kinds of unpopular measures could be repealed under the legislation, subject only to the consultation and the veto of the Select Committee on which the Minister relies as protections.