I will go on to explain why that deadline is inappropriate and, indeed, impractical.
The Government are using the Bill as a motivational tool. That message has not got through to DEFRA, which, as we know, is considered to be the Department with the most regulations, although, of course, until we see a definitive list, we cannot know that for sure. At the moment, according to the Secretary of State, there are probably about 1,100 regulations in DEFRA that are subject to the sunset. I will not get into whether the word “about” is good enough in this context, but the number of civil servants that we have been told are working on this in that Department is three. It is no good this Bill being used as a way of focusing Departments’ minds if they do not have the resources to do the job properly in the first place.
This is a serious issue. The House of Lords Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee even complained about a lack of engagement from that Department after not receiving a response from it to five separate letters. We know from a written ministerial answer that the Department itself does not know how much the exercise will cost or how many staff it will need. If the deadline is meant to focus attention, it has not succeeded in doing so yet.