Legislative Reform

I am sure that in its dialogue with insolvency practitioners, the Insolvency Service will make it clear that if people still think that that is the most appropriate course, they should take it. I fear that we are slightly mixing up two debates. There is a perfectly legitimate discussion to be had about local newspapers, of which I am a great fan; there is another discussion about the best method of trying to identify unidentified creditors in the insolvency process and trying to give insolvency practitioners and the companies themselves the flexibility to choose the best method. I now come to the point about the narrowness of the order. We might be in danger of putting too much weight on this process. Legislative reform orders are for a specific purpose; there are specific criteria. As one who picked up the baton of the Bill that gave rise to legislative reform orders halfway through its passage through the House, I can say that there are very tight controls on what they can contain. It has been said that the order is not ambitious enough and that there should be a much more wide-ranging reform of the Insolvency Service. That might be a legitimate point, but if we went down the road of totally recasting insolvency law, we would not do that through a legislative reform order; in fact, if we tried to, I suspect that the House would object and say that it was a proper matter for primary legislation. If we are dissatisfied with insolvency in general and we feel that insolvency law needs wider reform, that should be a subject for primary legislation. If we rejected the proposals in the legislative reform order because we were dissatisfied with the insolvency regime more widely, that would show a somewhat odd logic. Our judgment of the legislative reform order and the Committee's report on it should be based on the merits of the order itself and on whether the change is worth making. My contention is that it is. I have debated with the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) a number of times, and we often hear about that newsagent in Swansea; it is a regular feature of his contributions.