Watchdogs (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I put my name down for this debate, I suspected I would learn more than I imparted to the House. What dragged me towards this debate—that moment when you take that rare parliamentary step of getting out of your own little corner—was that, when I looked at the title, I remembered my experience many decades ago when I was the baby on the then water Bill. Indeed, when I explained this to my noble friend Lord Teverson, he asked whether I was on some sort of day release or child workforce project for Parliament.

I remember being told at the time that the regulator would work and would cover everything, but we have discovered that it did not. The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, has pulled that apart for us and shown that the regulator did not have the structure, the incentive or the vision to do anything about it, but we did not know that. The regulator just jogged on, doing its inadequate job and delivering on its original remit, and no one paid any attention until it was too late—until we had people making reports to the press, which then made their way to Parliament, and by that point you are often basically playing catch up and mend. The conclusion that I have come to is that the difference between a regulator and red tape is that the work is the same and you decide whether it is red tape or useful regulation.

There are many other regulatory bodies. As my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones pointed out, there is some debate about how many we have. Surely that is something that Parliament could sort out. Is it 90 or 200? Is there some subset below 90? Surely that is something to find out.

The central idea of an office for regulatory performance is a crucial one. It would be a much better way of allowing Parliament to see what was not working. If you have to come and report to Parliament, you will find out.

When it comes to regulation or red tape, I do not think that many people in either House are basically evil and out to get everybody else. They may have different views and objectives but if you can say, “Something isn’t working, so please do it differently”, you stand a good chance of somebody engaging. It is just one of those things that happens. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, pointed out something that we have not really looked at, because we did not really understand it until comparatively recently, and when it comes to new areas we have to do something. Also raised in this report is: do not just stick something into an existing body, if it has not got the structure to handle it, because everybody is panicked.

Having looked at this report, I think it seems awfully like common sense to anybody who has been around Parliament for a while. If you do not know that something has gone wrong and it is not in the press, Parliament will not discuss it, so the regulatory framework carries on until something catastrophic happens and there is real public failure, or until it becomes politically desirable or fashionable for the party in power to address it. Those things are both probably undesirable, because somebody comes through and makes sweeping changes that may not make it any good, or they are responding to a disaster.

Surely some form of reporting on how things are managed is very sensible. I hope that when the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, replies she will say that she is looking at this favourably. It does not have to be this scheme, but there should be something that reports back and lets us know how efficient things are. We are not asking for some revolution here, just for better monitoring of our current system.