Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

It is a great pity that so far in this debate on this important new clause, we have had from Government Members and the Liberal Democrats not a single example of a deregulatory measure that could be deployed under this power, with the single exception of game licences. Although I am very happy to welcome that one, it is not going to change the world a great deal. One would have expected the Government, when constructing this legislation over many months, to have in mind many examples of how they wished to use this power—to be limited a bit under new clause 19—and why it was reasonable in the light of what they wish to do. I want the Government to succeed at deregulation. It is a bit like suggesting that a tiger should become a vegetarian, but one lives in hope that the Government believe that deregulation is necessary and wish to do it. However, it would have been so much easier to have done it in the way that we proposed in a debate before the last election in this very House. We gave the Government 63 items for deregulation, including some very big ones, which were also given in writing to the Minister’s predecessor. The Government said that a parliamentary debate somehow did not count as a way of expressing our views on this matter, so I followed it up with a letter to the Department, thereby enabling officials to see that list of items for themselves. We said that that list should form the content of a deregulation Bill. That we are yet again having a longish debate about the constitutional implications of this Bill, just as we had to do on Second Reading and in Committee, shows that it is not a very good way of achieving the desired objective. Given that the leading Opposition party is more in favour of deregulation than are the Government, if they had introduced a proper deregulation Bill full of good ideas, it would probably have gone through much more quickly than the constitutional outrage before us on Second Reading, or the rather more limited constitutional outrage before us today. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher) is a Member whom I normally respect and praise. He is very good at defending the virtues of this House and its liberties, but he should have taken the precaution of attending Second Reading or reading the Hansard of it. Had he done so, he would have realised that I and my hon. Friends the Members for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) and for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke) made it very clear that the substantial and wide-ranging powers taken in the first draft of the Bill presented to this House were unacceptable. They allowed Ministers to regulate and legislate without going through the normal parliamentary processes. They enabled a major bypass of constitutional practice by effectively allowing primary legislation to be made by Ministers with very little reference to the House of Commons, in a regulatory, as well as deregulatory, direction. We are now told that new clause 19 will limit these wide-ranging powers to legislating in a deregulatory direction. As someone who desperately wants more deregulation, I say one cheer for that. But as someone who strongly believes that Parliament has a right to debate all such matters properly, I still share the concern of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) and others that there are still too many powers inherent in new clause 19. It would still give Ministers wide-ranging powers to do things that would be better done in the open. When I advised a former Government with a very large majority and a strong sense of political direction on privatisation, we had a choice. We could have said, ““Let’s take one piece of legislation to the House of Commons to give us an overall power to privatise anything we wish””, and then do it by order-making, industry by industry; or we could have done it by primary legislation, industry by industry. I advised—I think that the Cabinet was of the same view anyway—that it should be done industry by industry with separate pieces of legislation in each case. That meant far more effort and difficulty for the Ministers concerned, but it was the right and democratic thing to do. Because those major nationalisations had been put in place by separate pieces of legislation, industry by industry, we thought that they should be undone industry by industry, with much more lengthy and bruising debates in the House of Commons. It is extraordinary that the Government can still think it right, despite the change of heart represented by new clause 19, to propose deregulatory measures that take the form of removing pieces of primary legislation that have been passed by this House without going through the reverse process that would be expected. Why should not we have not only an annual Finance Bill but an annual deregulation Bill? Indeed, the House might discuss and vote on the proposition that there should be a combined finance and deregulation Bill every year. It would be wonderful if the Treasury learned the habit of deregulation and legislated for its tax revenues in a deregulatory way instead of the very regulatory way that it does under this Government year after year, with hundreds of pages of new and complex provisions for old taxes as well as new ones. We could then have deregulatory budgets, Department by Department, so that each year a Department would know that there was a piece of legislation that it could use to fulfil the requirement to cut the amount of regulatory burden that it was imposing. Alternatively, the Government could achieve their deregulatory aims by ensuring that each major departmental piece of legislation that went through had an additional deregulatory section. We hoped that that was what the Prime Minister had in mind when he told us, in respect of regulations, that it would be a case of one in, one out. We hoped that each piece of regulating legislation would therefore contain a complementary deregulatory section so that we could be assured that the overall burden was not going up. But the Government never do that. They do not take advantage of the many legislative vehicles trundling through this House of Commons year after year, usually covering each of the main Departments in turn, by including them in their deregulatory ambitions. Today, we are again left with a truncated and guillotined debate on big changes in constitutional practice. Like my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), I welcome new clause 19 compared with the original measure. I will not be churlish enough to vote against it, because it is moving in the right direction and I welcome it in preference to having nothing in its place. However, I urge the Government to think again about how serious they are about deregulation and whether there is a better way of achieving it than using the very considerable powers that the Bill will grant the Government if it goes through without further major amendment. It is disturbing that we can have many long debates on deregulation without anything of a deregulatory nature being mentioned, apart from game licences, welcome though that is. Ministers still do not seem to understand that many colleagues on both sides of the House are very worried by this power for different reasons—not only those who fear that the Government may deregulate something that they think is good regulation, but those of us who are strongly in favour of far more deregulation than the Government have in mind but would like it to be done properly by the front door instead of improperly by the back door. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire and I find ourselves placed in a dilemma that is not of our choosing. We will not vote against new clause 19, but nor do we welcome this legislation. We welcome its intent, but we do not believe that the Government are really serious about it. If they were, they would by now have had their long lists of items that they were going to deregulate. We are left with the paradox that we may have a Bill that does not deregulate very much, but leaves on the statute book some worrying powers for future Ministers.