I am grateful to the Minister, who must have laboured long and hard, burning the midnight oil to prepare the speech with which she launched this momentous set of regulations.
The Explanatory Memorandum deals with the impact of the regulations on business, charities and voluntary bodies and describes the impact as “negligible”. That is
the judgment that I would make on the impact of the regulations on local government and communities: it is negligible. The noble Baroness rightly said that matters were set on foot in 2008. I have a vision of armies of civil servants in the Department for Communities and Local Government labouring over seven years to produce this momentous change in practice and in law, and I am tempted to echo the sentiments of Winston Churchill in remarking on the fact that probably never in the history of secondary legislative endeavour has so much labour been employed for so long and to such little effect—for very little changes under these regulations.
It is particularly important that the Government continue to reserve a role for the Secretary of State. My honourable friend Steven Reed in the debates in the Commons pointed out that the Welsh Assembly Government have dispensed with the role of the Minister and the Secretary of State in Wales. Curiously, Her Majesty’s Government went to court over these matters; they are usually critical of those who seek to take the decisions of Governments to court, but they took the Welsh Government to court and I am pleased to say that they lost over that decision to leave the Minister out of the picture altogether. True localism, I suggest, would make that course much the more desirable.
There is another issue that arises from the Explanatory Memorandum, which is that by-laws are not only made under the auspices of this department: there are other government departments which have responsibilities for by-laws. One might have thought that across government there would be some discussion about having a uniform system for by-laws. No attempt appears to have been made to do that. So we have at least a binary system, where one or more other government departments will still require the procedure for by-laws made under the local government legislation which these regulations are changing. Has it never occurred to Ministers that they should look across government and provide a uniform system? I have already indicated that this change does not amount to much, but it is surely better to have a uniform system, whatever its character, than to have two apparently parallel systems running side by side. Perhaps the noble Baroness would agree to take back this aspect at least, and try to ensure that there is a common approach across government.
Of course the Opposition are not opposed to this very modest change. In fairness, I do not think that it was envisaged to be all that ambitious when it was initiated by the original legislation, so I am not claiming this as a party point. It does seem sad, however, that it has taken this long to produce such a feeble change in the system, and perhaps we can have assurance that any further change will be made with a great deal more expedition.