Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, this Bill contains important, sensible and proportionate measures to improve the regulatory regime in the UK in a wide range of areas. It is not a radical, wholesale overhaul of regulation. The coalition Government are not, of course, opposed to regulation. This Government believe in and will protect the sensible and necessary regulations that ensure that the safeguards are in place to protect people and the environment as well as to promote competition and economic growth.
However, if it is to protect the interests of consumers and the safety of the public effectively, regulation must be sensible and proportionate. In many areas in recent years, we have seen regulatory burdens grow out of all proportion, surpassing what is necessary and costing businesses and public services additional millions of pounds. The Government’s aim when coming into office was to reduce the administrative burden on business created by regulation, and to encourage enterprise, innovation and, most importantly, the creation of new jobs, which give this country long-term economic security.
In April 2011, the Prime Minister announced that this Government should be the first in modern history to leave office having reduced the overall burden of regulation rather than increased it. The one-in, one-out policy, and later the one-in, two-out policy were introduced as one of the major components of the Government’s strategy to achieve this aim, ensuring that the flow of new regulations is necessary, effective, justified and proportionate, in order to minimise unnecessary burdens on business.
The Red Tape Challenge was introduced in April 2011 to give business and the general public the opportunity to challenge the Government to get rid of unnecessarily burdensome regulations. More than 30,000 comments were crowdsourced online from individuals and businesses, harnessing the knowledge of those people faced with understanding and complying with these regulations. In the light of this public feedback, departmental policy leads presented a package of deregulatory proposals, which were then reviewed and challenged by Red Tape Challenge Ministers.
The intention was to reverse the default setting by asking departments to consider the legislation they are responsible for in a fundamentally different way. The starting point has been that regulation should be delivered in a non-regulatory way, unless there is good justification for the Government being involved. The Red Tape Challenge sought wide-ranging comment on a large number of regulations, from health and safety and environmental regulations, to housing and construction and insolvency law. The final report will be published towards the end of the Parliament, setting out the achievements made by the Red Tape Challenge and the one-in, two-out programmes in reducing the overall burden of regulation on business in this Parliament.
Looking to the future, legislation for new statutory deregulation targets was announced in the Queen’s Speech. This will require a target to be published for the removal of regulatory burdens in each parliamentary term, and for government to report transparently against that target. During the course of this Parliament, the Government have also invested a large amount of time in looking at how the agencies undertake the enforcement of these regulations, to ensure that they are measured and proportionate and not applied arbitrarily without thought to the impact on business.
The Deregulation Bill is thus a small but important part of the Government’s ongoing process of reducing the number of unjustifiable regulations. Much of what the Red Tape Challenge has done has been achieved by alterations to secondary legislation and administrative changes. However, during the course of the Red Tape Challenge process, many reforms were found that required primary legislation to fulfil. This Bill will create around £400 million in savings over 10 years and declutter the statute book of obsolete or confusing legislation. Those who have read all the way through to Schedule 20 will know that a number of 19th century statutes are repealed.
The Government believe that it is good housekeeping to review and tidy the statute book to make it easier for the users of the law. Several pieces of legislation were identified through the Red Tape Challenge as being no longer of practical use. The Government are using the opportunity of the Deregulation Bill to repeal those obsolete laws. This is in addition to the excellent work done by the Law Commission through its statutory law of repeal process, which principally focuses on repealing primary obsolete legislation.
The Bill was first published in draft and underwent pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, which reported in December 2013. I look forward to his contribution to this debate, as well as those of three other members of that committee: the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and the noble Lords, Lord Sharkey and Lord Naseby. The Joint Committee welcomed the concept of the Bill, saying it hoped that there would be more of the same sort in the future. The Joint Committee also suggested that the Bill could benefit from the addition of some more substantial items when it was introduced.
The Government accepted the primary recommendations of the Joint Committee and have added 30 new clauses to the Bill. The Bill was introduced to the other place in January of this year as a carryover Bill. It underwent extensive consideration in Committee and two days of debates on Report before being passed to this House.
Some of the key measures in the Bill are as follows. Clause 1 exempts self-employed people from Section 3(2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, except those who are on a list of high-hazard industries or activities, which will be set out in regulation. The proposed change emanates from a recommendation made by Professor Löfstedt in his review of health and safety and will exempt around 2 million self-employed people from the health and safety legislation that is unnecessary for the work activities they are undertaking.
Clause 2 removes the power from employment tribunals to make wider recommendations to employers in discrimination cases. These have been identified by businesses as a burden and are often surplus to requirements because businesses, keen to avoid further tribunals, often undertake the necessary actions without any such recommendations needing to be made.
Clauses 3 to 5 implement some of the key recommendations of the Richard review, simplifying what apprenticeships are and the process by which they are developed and awarded, and providing the legislative basis for a new payment system to route funding directly to employers so that they are more responsive to their needs.
Clauses 21 to 26 implement the recommendations of the independent stakeholder working group on unrecorded rights of way that require primary legislation. They are part of a carefully balanced package of reforms that is supported by the full range of interests on rights of way, from the Ramblers to the Country Land and Business Association. Some noble Lords may have seen the useful briefing from the Ramblers that reached my inbox this morning. It is a remarkable consensus around the particularly emotive and contentious but important issue of public rights of way.
The reforms will make the procedures for recording or changing rights of way more streamlined and flexible but will also give local authorities more scope to use their judgment in dealing with insubstantial or irrelevant applications and objections, and enable the development of locally negotiated solutions. They will help towards completion of the definitive map and statement by the cut-off date, in current legislation, of 2026. There are also provisions to enable the right to apply for an extinguishment or diversion to be extended to all landowners, while enabling any public funding expended in that process to be recovered in full where an application is solely in the landowner’s interest. The provisions fit broadly with the Government’s aim of reducing regulation, of smaller government and of giving more power to local authorities and local people to resolve disputes.
Clauses 29 to 34 relate to housing and development matters. These include: reinstating the original qualifying period of three years for right to buy; relaxing restrictions on Londoners to rent out their homes for less than three months at a time; introducing a regime of optional building requirements for local authorities to support the Government’s housing standards review; and a clause addressing an unexpected judgment related to tenancy deposits.
Clauses 35 to 40 remove some of the outdated burdens relating to transport legislation, bringing legislation into line with practice; for example, removing the requirement on local authorities to seek permission from the Secretary of State to establish, alter or remove zebra crossings. This section also includes measures limiting the use of CCTV when issuing parking fines by post and removes the automatic reopening of formal investigations of marine accidents when new evidence, however trivial, comes to light.
Clause 43 removes the criminal sanctions which currently apply when householders make mistakes presenting waste for collection. A civil penalty regime will exist instead when a householder fails to comply with requirements and this causes harm to the local amenity. The Government believe this to be a more proportionate course of action.
Clauses 45 to 48 change the nature of child trust funds to bring them into line with the arrangements of the much more widely used junior ISAs.
Clauses 52 to 59 make reasonable and rational alterations to the regulations around alcohol and entertainment which have been discussed on a number of occasions in this Chamber since I became a Member. These include sensible changes such as removing the requirement on community film clubs to obtain a licence to exhibit films, while maintaining all the regulations related to age-related restrictions; and creating a new light-touch form of authorisation under the Licensing Act 2003 for community groups and certain businesses to sell small amounts of alcohol. This section also commits the Government to undertake a review of the alternatives to criminal sanctions for non-payment of TV licences.
Clauses 79 to 81 make some changes to legislation to make it easier for users of law. These are the power to spell out dates in legislation, enacting part of the Government’s good law initiative by creating a power to combine different forms of subordinate legislation, and a power to use ambulatory references for international shipping instruments.
Clauses 83 to 86 create a statutory duty for non-economic regulators to consider economic growth when carrying out their functions. This duty will be supplementary to, and will not supplant, the regulators’ other statutory obligations. It will make them take economic growth into account as they exercise their regulatory functions. Guidance on this has just been published. I hope that a copy has reached the Opposition Front Bench. There is a copy available in the Library.
The wide-ranging nature of the Bill should emphasise the Government’s comprehensive consideration of all areas of regulation to ensure that regulation is proportionate and necessary. Most of the measures are relatively technical and not politically contentious. No doubt we shall be told in the course of Second Reading that some are considered contentious. As such, this is an important step towards relieving businesses, individuals and public sector organisations of unnecessary administrative burdens, freeing them up to pursue economic growth for Britain without excessive regulation. The Government look forward to the detailed and expert scrutiny that this House can offer. I beg to move that the Bill be read a second time.