My Lords, I am having a busy day. Again, this is a rewind in glorious technicolour, because we spent a lot of time on this over the last two years of the last Parliament. It is back again for reasons that I do not understand; I hope that the Minister will listen again to the arguments we have made, because I will end up by quoting from her the exact case that I wish to make—indeed, I might shorten my speech if I simply cut to that chase. I would have done, except that just before this meeting of the Committee the Minister published by Written Statement a list of all the bodies that are likely to come into scope of the provisions of the Bill. That was somewhat worrying to read, because I understood that the proposals in the Bill were to require bodies called “regulators”—there is a very large list of those—to undertake new responsibilities with regard to growth and reporting. The growth part came in earlier legislation and the reporting is largely brought in here. However, the number of regulators is being extended.
We are making the point that in a business-focused Bill it seems strange to us to receive representations from bodies affected by this which do not carry out business activity. An example here is obviously the
Equality and Human Rights Commission. My noble friend Lady Hayter will raise other ones, including the Charity Commission, for which there can be no question of whether they are providing business regulation or an impact on business. Indeed, in the case of the Equality and Human Rights Commission it is quite the reverse.
Clause 13 extends the BIT requirements to all national statutory regulators so that they must assess the financial cost to business of changes to designated statutory regulatory functions and then secure validation of that assessment from an independent body and report annually on this aspect of their work. The stated purpose in the Bill is to ensure that regulators improve the understanding and transparency of the effect of their regulatory activities on business and to broaden the responsibility beyond government to achieve the target of reducing the associated regulatory burdens on businesses—which is said to be £10 billion, but we beg to differ on that point.
If you have a regulator who is not involved in advising businesses how they should operate and is not providing advice and everything else, I do not understand why it is included in the list. There is no question that we support the aim of the Bill; in fact, the impact on the main statutory regulations is good and something we can support. However, we have a problem with the unintended consequences of trying to include everybody listed in the lists that were published.
The two main concerns that have been raised with us is that as the commission does not set standards in the sense that other regulators do, feeling that that is a job for the legislature and the judiciary, it has no power to go in and inspect businesses, nor does it have to charge fees or recover costs from them, so it is to some extent by its own definition excluded from the activities they are trying to be involved with. However, the more important point is that the imposition of this requirement on the commission would jeopardise its high standing as a United Nations-accredited “A” status body, which depends under the UN Paris principles on being independent from government interference, direction or control. By passing a law of this nature the commission believes strongly—and I think that this argument was accepted by the Government last time round—that it would not be able to be regarded as independent from government interference, direction or control by definition. The last time we brought this up, the Minister, in responding during the passage of the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act at Third Reading, said:
“The Government have always maintained that the EHRC is a very special case and should not be subject to the duty to appoint a champion. We considered that an exemption in secondary legislation would be sufficient, but noble Lords were concerned about this and the potential implication for the EHRC’s “A” status as a national human rights institution. The Government believe that there is only a very small risk here, but we have listened to noble Lords and agreed to eliminate the risk altogether with this amendment, which I know from the debate will be welcomed across the House”.—[Official Report, 17/3/15; col. 1007.]
I would be grateful if the Minister could explain what is different this time round. I beg to move.
6.15 pm