My Lords, this group of amendments focuses on strengthening the work and role of the Regulatory Policy Committee. As the Minister has already said, it is good to find an independent body able to look widely across the regulatory field and make recommendations without fear or favour, and we value its work. However, it is a little hampered by the fact that it is not currently able to report except
in terms of where the Government set their objectives. I have already criticised that and we should put that aside for the moment and say, well, those are the objectives. But we should also reflect, if we can, on where we might go on that.
The point has been made, better than I could possibly make it, in a quotation that I would like to read:
“if you have the privilege of being in government, you should try and think about the long term and not just today. And in the long term, I think the country would be better off if we thought about wellbeing and quality of life as well as economic growth”.
That was the Prime Minister. That sentiment is picked up by work that has been done in a number of think tanks, notably the Legatum Institute. The noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, has picked up the idea of thinking more widely about where Governments should be aiming in what they do about the impact of their legislative and regulatory programmes.
There are two minor points in this group that I also want to pick up. First, as I understand it, the Treasury has now changed its view about how impact assessments are owned and operated through Whitehall by asking for a business-critical model to be introduced for many impact statements where there is a senior responsible owner quoted as a named individual of sufficient seniority to take responsibility for the model throughout its lifecycle and to sign it off as fit for purpose prior to use. Is that now common practice across Whitehall or is this a work in progress? If the latter, will the out-turn be something that we can look forward to in terms of improving the quality of impact statements? I think the reason for this is the west coast main line franchise fracas. I need not say much more about that, since it was quite clear that there was not sufficient seniority in the department to take responsibility for what went wrong there.
My point here is that if we are seeing changes in some of the infrastructure activity in preparing for legislation and regulation, this would be an opportunity to have that on the table so that we could make judgments about it. I beg to move.