Government: Draft Legislative Programme

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on arranging this debate, which is rather a nice one to have at the end of term. It is a very good moment to have it. My main reason for speaking is to welcome the idea of issuing a draft legislative programme. Some noble Lords have called it an experiment. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt, said that we are being given more homework. I do not think that it is entirely new. This obviously comes from the same stable as the Pre-Budget Report, and we have all seen the advantages of that. Discussing what you intend to do is now seen as a better way of running the economy than keeping it secret. Surely openness creates more support and better understanding of the legislative steps taken. I agree with the Minister that ultimately there must be fewer unintended consequences. But, most importantly, people know that their concerns are more likely to be dealt with if they are in an intended Bill rather than if they are just in a party manifesto. This all makes for better legislation. As we all know, for a whole host of reasons it is far easier to scrutinise and amend a Bill early. I agree with the Minister that this must be especially helpful to our work in your Lordships' House. I would like to say one or two words about the Bills relating to the economy. It seems to me that there are three Bills which specifically address the needs of business. I agree with my noble friend Lord Morris that the education and skills Bill is probably the most important. I know that we have debated the Leitch report in your Lordships' House but I think that there are still problems regarding this Bill, and these are problems at the fringes. By that I mean problems regarding people who move in and out of the Bill’s orbit. My noble friend Lord Morris spoke about training as building social capital and he is right. When people leave school they usually have four options: continuing education; work, either paid or voluntary; skills training or any combination of the above. Recently a further option has been discovered—the opt-out option. Researchers estimate that about 1 million young people are somehow missing from all this. The Bill has to work with this group not only because they lack education and skills but because they are overwhelmingly represented in the prison population. That is part of what I call the fringe. The other part of the fringe are the young people at further education colleges because they are also in transition. Does the Minister know that there are more 16 to 18 year-olds at FE colleges than at school? The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to this. In practice, these colleges can predict and provide only the kind of education and training required by local employers. However, there seems to be a lot of confusion and uncertainty about where to draw the line between the skills needs of the economy and the education needs of these young people. The opposite fringe is when people have successfully mastered skills and established themselves at work and move into a management role or take on more responsibility. This applies in both the public and private sectors. Innumerable reports have demonstrated that a major cause of business failure, poor productivity, lack of innovation and slow progress towards the knowledge economy is poor management skills. The proposed Bill virtually ignores this. The reason seems to be that although the Government acknowledge the problem they are not sure what to do about it and neither do the training and skills councils. I have a suggestion: ask the new Business Council to deal with it. After all, many of its members are on record as lamenting the shortage of management skills. Surely they are the people to suggest a remedy and to act on it. Two further Bills related to business are the Employment Simplification Bill and the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill. There is a connection between the two. This connection usually becomes apparent to me at election time when I hold a number of business breakfasts for Labour candidates. Invariably red tape is mentioned and usually the discussion targets employment regulations and the employment tribunal industry—and it is an industry because the unintended consequence of employment law is that it has become horribly legalistic. We have all experienced it. The Bill is intended to simplify this as suggested by the Gibbons review, but I think that the Government should go further. As well as dismantling the legal structure, I hope that the Government will put a lot more money into the conciliation service. Let that service copy charities with helplines, voluntary mediators, mentors and even naming and shaming. I hope that the Government will use this opportunity to balance the risks and rewards and so start to eliminate this regulatory industry which is entirely non-productive. Nobody can speak in this debate without mentioning the one Bill that is different; it is not a matter of political will but more a test of character and of the way we deal with each other. I refer to the climate change Bill. The Bill is about adjusting to climate change, planning for a low carbon economy and how we will reduce our carbon emissions. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford said that it is also about housing. He is right: it is about everything. What is different about this Bill is that it is not a matter of political will; it is something about which we have no choice. We are all in it together whether we like it or not. My noble friend Lord Puttnam, chair of the pre-legislative scrutiny committee scrutinising the Bill, has described it as a test of the fragility of our democracy. He is right. But do not let this spoil your Lordships’ holiday. The House has the capacity to cope and emerge with its character intact and stronger than ever.