My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 49CA. I declare my interests as set out in the register, especially in insurance. The amendment is about old gold plate, which I talked about at Second Reading. I will first pick up on something that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said in his thought-provoking introduction, which was that businesses do not care where things come from. I am not sure that I agree with that. One thing they certainly do care about is the level playing field. If a business has a European Union regulation and it is over-implemented in its home nation and not in its competitor nations, it is at a disadvantage and cares a lot.
The old gold plate—it should be called lead plate because it is a great drain on business resource—problem can be briefly summarised by saying that there have been three eras of transposition of EU regulations. In reverse order, there is the era from coalition times—2011—until today, where there are very good transposition arrangements: a good solid
anti-gold plate look at any legislation and sunset and review clauses to ensure that things are self-righting if they are not quite right.
Then there is the period from 2006 and the Davidson review—of which more in a second—when the issue had been recognised and there were good anti-gold plate arrangements, but the use of sunset and review clauses was limited. Then there is the period prior to that, which I call old gold plate, where there was no self-righting mechanism for the shedding of the gold plate and the bringing into line of the UK with the other competitor nations of our regulatory environment.
I had a quick look at Lord Davidson’s review in preparation for this debate. I noticed that chapter 2 is called “Cases of Gold Plating”. The first three words of chapter 2 are “insurance mediation directive”. I was reminded last night by senior insurance industry colleagues that the 12 pages of that directive were turned by the FSA into more than 1,000 pages of stuff, which has been a source of great pain for my beloved home industry.
The reason behind the amendment is to try to provide a mechanism for getting the old gold plate reviewed. It is a mechanism which is compliant with the coalition, in that it is a one-shot mechanism—an individual, as a regulator, is in charge of reviewing themselves once and writing a report. That is all they have to do. It is a sort of reverse name and shame mechanism.
It was the best that I could do in terms of thinking up how one could attack the problem. It could be the case, but I hope it is not, that the Minister does not consider this a suitable Bill in which to begin attacking the problem. Sooner or later for, sound commercial reasons, we are going to have to tackle the old gold plate. I note that Lord Davidson’s report was in 2006, and nothing substantial has happened on his recommendations about the insurance mediation directive.