Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I refer to my entry in the House of Lords register of interests. This gives me a good opportunity to ask one question of the Minister: has he noticed that this Part of the Bill refers to many things which were in the Financial Services Bill and that both are entirely different from everything else the Government are doing? In every other part of the Government’s actions we are reducing the amount of regulation. Much of the Bill is about that, but when we get on to the financial services arrangements, we are laying more and more emphasis upon more and more regulation and there is no indication, in my view, that it is going to be any better. It is really beginning to bug me that much of what has gone wrong was, of course, the fault of the financial services—I am not for one moment denying that—and certainly the fault of the banks, but I cannot honestly say that the regulator has come out of it with a great deal of praise. Indeed, a number of the things that went wrong can be laid directly at the door of the regulator. So the regulator then comes back and says, “Well, the only way to solve these problems is to have more regulation and more powers, so we can get it more wrong.”

My worry is simply that everywhere else in the Government’s programme, the Government have made the argument that if we have too heavy regulation, we do not have innovation, we do not have new things, we do not have new ideas and new mechanisms to meet the new circumstances of Britain, which after all is in competition with the rest of the world. That is the logic, that is the argument; an argument I buy into. The one area in which that is evidently not true is this one. So now we have had two Bills which interrelate and in this Part of the Bill, which is otherwise an admirable Bill, it has merely gone on doing what the Financial Services Bill had so wrongly done elsewhere. So we have an attitude to regulation which is entirely inconsistent.

We have just had two Bills going through the House of Lords and noble Lords may have noticed that the passage of the Civil Aviation Bill was entirely filled with speeches by Ministers about how wonderful it was that the public was now going to have a great deal more say and more appeal, and the regulators were not going to be able to ride roughshod over customers, businesses and the like. At exactly the same time, we introduced another Bill saying there are going to be no appeals, the public are not going to have a say, businesses are not going to have a say but instead we will have tougher and tougher regulations. I find this incomprehensible and as I have tried on several occasions to raise it in detail it would help me a great deal if the Minister would explain the rather curious mismatch.

Of course, the party opposite has not raised this very much because it wants more regulation in every circumstance: we know that. I raise it at this opportunity because I cannot do it on the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, but I think that in 10 years’ time—probably in five years’ time—people will look back at this period in Parliament and say, “What the blazes were they doing making the British financial industry less able to compete and less able to innovate, when they were doing so much good stuff in the whole of the rest of British industry?”.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I shall try to resist temptation. As to spectacles, of course it was the consumers who most wanted opticians not to be regulated. It has benefited us all because we have been able to buy much cheaper glasses than we used to.

I would like to ask the Minister, in the complete secrecy of this room, with only a few Hansard writers and television watchers present, that if his Government had not wanted a bonfire of the quangos, would this merger ever have gone ahead? Was it just another number in the bonfire of the quangos or did BIS always want this?