Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Debate between Viscount Eccles and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Monday 12th January 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, to be clear, this is a probing amendment, which could be called the “lowest minded” of my amendments today, because I simply cannot make sense of Clause 22. I will be grateful for any guidance that the Minister can give.

First, Clause 22 defines statutory, regulatory and qualifying regulatory provisions. I am surprised that these need to be defined again in this Bill; in no sense do I accuse the Government of being otiose as regards wanting to repeat legislation, but perhaps the Minister can explain why that is necessary. These seem to be bog-standard—I am sorry; I am sure that that is not a parliamentary term—or very obviously standard phrases that are used commonly within legislative processes and they should not need redefining. If there is a story behind that, I would like to know it. The only point that comes out is that the issues that seem to be defined are that the Secretary of State has discretion to make whatever regulation he or she may wish to at an appropriate time. That seems very close to a Henry VIII power and I would like clarification that that is not the case. I beg to move.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, what the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said reinforces my view that the question of impact has not been carefully thought through. Perhaps the most difficult thing in the previous clause is the question of the methodology. You could have any number of economics professors lined up across the equator and they would all completely disagree about the methodology for an economic impact assessment on this subject. If in addition you have a way of cherry-picking by regulation the regulators that you wish to be included in the impact statement, the thing becomes quite byzantine.

Postal Services Bill

Debate between Viscount Eccles and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Wednesday 6th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I thank the Minister very much for his comments. He came up to us at the end of day three of the Committee stage, with a more mournful expression than he sometimes has on his face, saying that we had cheated him of his moment of glory because we had withdrawn our amendment at quite short notice. It was the only amendment that he was down to speak to that day, and we took it away from him. Now here he is, irresistibly back in the Box, popping up all the time. So it does come back; it goes in rounds.

Quite a lot of what we have talked about today are what could be described as mop-up provisions and backstops—things that are very unlikely to occur. The Minister argued that, as a result, we did not really need to put them in the Bill, because they were so unlikely that it would be a waste of our time to spend our precious moments on them. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book that I am sure all noble Lords have read, or listened to the programmes, there is a vehicle driven by a thing called the improbability drive, which has the result of making the space travellers turn up in the least likely situation that can be imagined at the time of their arriving. In a situation where they are being threatened by giants and attacked from all sides, they think of something completely unlikely and are immediately transported there. I simply say this because sometimes the impossible and the improbable does happen; we should not be deluded into thinking that it is so remote that we should not have provisions for it. That was what inspired us to put forward these proposals, some of which the Minister looked at sympathetically and some of which he did not.

It is important to have contingency provisions, and we are not arguing against that, but if we are going to do that we should be consistent. I hope that on reflection the Minister might accept that there were one or two points in what we said that might be worthy of a little bit more consideration. The principle on which we have been working is that if the aim is continuity, the going-concern process would be the least disruptive. That is why our amendments are framed as they are. I do not think that anything the Minister said is against what we are trying to achieve. My sense is that the whole process of going into administration would be such a major issue that making sure that there was greater concern than currently expressed in the statute for going concern would be helpful. But we would not push that at this stage.

As we reach the end of our discussions here, I wanted to say that, particularly today but as mentioned on a number of occasions in Committee, we have been a little unkind about Postcomm. We had a quotation from the noble Viscount that expressed in its own terms what it felt about itself. Even so, I am sure that the people at Postcomm have done what they could with possibly difficult ammunition to achieve what Parliament wanted them to do, and no personal criticism should be implied by what we or anybody else has said. On the other hand, the Minister kindly pointed out what the framework was for the new regulatory structure and expressed various options and hopes for that, but he did not say that Ofcom would not be an unsympathetic regulator in the same way as Postcomm was. We should bear that in mind. Having said that, we register our support for government Amendment 26.

[Viscount Eccles]

I intended no criticism of the individuals in Postcomm. We need to remember that regulators have only a limited amount of independence. We are inclined to talk as though they had a rather larger amount of independence than they actually have. When I look at the 2000 Act and think about the policy intentions behind it and the interpretation of them, I am not entirely surprised that Postcomm got itself into what it admits is a very difficult position. In any evaluation of how the present situation comes about, we have to remember—and that is exactly why I intervened on Schedule 9—that the Government of the day are in the final analysis the accountable body and Parliament with it, and the regulator is trying to carry out their wishes as it interprets them, with a certain amount of independence, but only a certain amount.