Deregulation: Public Services and Health and Safety

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Best, was immensely important and underpins the philosophy my noble friend Lady Andrews put forward. There is a real risk that the party opposite, in questioning the role of the state, which it is doing, is clearly undermining many important public safeguards.

I did not agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Patten, said, although I take his point on special advisers. Despite Mr Cameron’s promise before the 2010 election, he proved himself to be attracted to the appointment of special advisers if we look at the figures and the amount of money spent. The one thing I agree with the noble Lord on is this: going back 40 years, almost every Prime Minister has had a certain obsession with deregulation. The one thing that seems to characterise each of those Prime Ministers is that none of them has ever had any experience of running anything, which has led them to believe that when people come along and say, “The whole of British society is weighed down by overbureaucratic burdens”, they have tended to believe it. We have had a succession of Cabinet committees, task forces, tsars—you name it, we have had it.

The problem is that it has coloured the approach to sensible regulation that we ought to have in this country. The most important point that has been made by a number of my noble friends and the noble Lord, Lord Best, is that reputable companies do not mind proper, sensible regulations provided there is a level playing field and that there are regulators that can enforce those regulations. The problem is that if you take the Government’s very light approach to regulation, which is soft touch in terms of regulators, often the regulations they allow to continue are not properly enforced. That then allows the cowboy companies to operate and reputable companies are put at great risk. Certainly when I was Minister responsible for the Health and Safety Executive and the DWP, that is the thing that struck me most: companies would grumble about regulations, but the one thing they would say, once they had the regulations, was, “For goodness sake, ensure a level playing field and enforcement”.

The problem we have is a combination: austerity has forced local authorities in particular but other public authorities as well to almost invariably accept the lowest bid in a competitive tendering process. Whatever the Government say—one can challenge them on this and they blather on about best value—the fact is that nine times out of 10, 99 times out of 100, local authorities and health services go for the lowest tender. The combination of a deregulatory approach plus the kind of public sector tendering we have often means that the very companies we want to encourage—as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, they are the quality companies—lose out. It is time for us to have a much more sensible approach to regulation.

I enjoyed, if that is the word, life as a Deregulation Minister—we called it Better Regulation Minister—in six departments. For some reason I was always appointed the Better Regulation Minister. It seems to be a punishment for Lords Ministers, looking at some of my colleagues. Regularly, we were summoned across to Downing Street to account for our sins, often with Prime Ministers advised by the special advisers referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Patten, who brought great experience and wisdom to their job. As we explained our dismal performance—because most of us thought that the regulations that we had were pretty good—the Prime Minister’s eyes glazed over in that awful way of his and we knew that our prospects of promotion had been put back yet one more year.

We colluded with the Civil Service and offered up old regulations which were never in any use, so we got the numbers up, but fortunately most of us were sensible and kept the regulations that were required to defend the public interest. The problem was that Ministers in the Government when they were in coalition actually believed in it, so they got rid of some essential underpinning regulations which would ensure public safety and consumer protection. Like my noble friend Lord Whitty, I am in favour of the nanny state. The reason is that it protects vulnerable people from many of the inherent problems that arise in a deregulated society.

I am sorry again to turn to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, but he and I have been debating these things, both here and in Oxford City Council chamber, for many years. He mentioned that the Government had taken this deregulatory approach to the public sector. He mentioned teachers. Unfortunately in your Lordships’ House, we tend not to have teachers in the membership, but my experience is that since Mr Gove’s unfortunate appearance as Secretary of State for Education, their autonomy has been virtually destroyed. We now have this rigid national curriculum where poor kids are focused entirely on a narrow range of subjects, where the liberal arts seem to have been completely taken out of curricula in state schools and where teachers are wholly demoralised by the lack of innovation and enthusiasm they can bring to the job.

Finally, in relation to the public sector, and seeing the noble Lord, Lord Prior, who knows an awful lot about the health service, I would hardly describe the Health and Social Care Act 2012 as an example of a Government approaching the public sector with a degree of light-touch autonomy. As he knows, it is the most extraordinary heavy-handed architecture that has ever been seen in legislation in relation to both the health service and other areas of the public sector. Sadly, the Government seem to have forgotten to bring the Bill they promised in their manifesto to lighten up the health service architecture—no doubt the noble Lord can tell us why.

My final point about regulation is the irony of Brexit. As my noble friend Lord Haskel has reminded us, the CBI reckons that, in place of the kind of regulation we have now, 32 bodies will have to be established in one way or another to regulate us post Brexit. The noble Lord, Lord Prior, will again know that medicines regulation is an excellent example of this. At the moment in the EU, we have a European regulator for medicines and then there is a national regulator. If your national regulator, in accordance with the rules, or the European regulator licenses a medicine, it can be used throughout the EU. In the future, we will have our MHRA, which is excellent, but, under the Brexit regime, to introduce a medicine in the UK you will need to go through the MHRA. The companies that do so will need a guarantee that, if they get a licence here, it will be recognised throughout the EU.

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

Twenty-seven countries.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Precisely. The problem is that the European court gets involved in it, so the Government cannot agree a mutual recognition position. We have £4 billion invested in R&D in this country by the pharmaceutical sector. One result will be that it will not continue to invest, despite the fact that 14 of the top 100 medicines are now developed here. That is because it will not go through the pain of getting a licence in the UK when it also has to go to Europe: it will develop in Europe and in other parts of the world. If ever one wanted a great contrast and irony with this Government’s approach, it is that, in the mystical, deregulatory world that they wish to put into our country, the decisions they have taken are going to lead to a country which, because of Brexit, will actually have to be regulated in a very expensive way, putting at great risk our jobs, our economy and our livelihoods. Never could one see a more remarkable and ridiculous proposition than that which we have from this Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

It is a delight to follow my noble friend Lord Smith of Finsbury, one of our great regulators. It is my fate as sweeper in this incredibly knowledgeable debate to repeat what other noble Lords have already said, but not quite so well. I congratulate my noble friend on securing this timely, indeed prescient, debate and on her excellent and sensitive opening remarks. I declare an interest as outgoing president of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute and chair of the Consumer Codes Approval Board.

Just a month ago, an appalling fire broke out at Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey tower block in North Kensington. So far, 80 people are presumed dead, with the final number of deaths not expected to be known until the end of the year. As well as being the most dreadful tragedy for those men, women and children involved, the Grenfell fire has made us all pause as a country and reflect on how such a terrible event could have occurred in the first place and where could be next. People’s safety is now the major talking point in our land. A public inquiry has been launched and will be examining fire safety and construction regulations, as noble Lords have said.

Yet it is not our role here in Parliament simply to wait for the outcome of that inquiry. It must surely be right for us to discuss and examine more widely where we are in terms of our political and legislative approach to regulation and deregulation in modern Britain, and I therefore welcome today’s debate as part of that important discourse.

The House of Lords Library briefing for this debate looks dispassionately at how all Governments have approached deregulation over the past 20 years. In looking through that, what I found striking was how, in that time period, we have moved from a position of better regulation, albeit more simplified and more business-friendly, under the Labour Government of 1997—of course we did not get it all right and of course it was the beginning of the madness we see now, but there was a real emphasis on trying to get better regulation—to the very crude “one in, three out” policy of the most recent Conservative Government of 2016, whereby government departments were required to introduce £3 of savings to business for every £1 cost of new regulatory legislation. That, along with statutory regulators also being tasked by government always to look first at the cost to business of regulation, has led to organisations such as the Government’s advisory body, the Regulatory Policy Committee, concluding in 2016 that,

“society as a whole is worse off”,

as a result of government intervention in this field. That is the Government’s own advisory body telling them that.

It is most surely right to look again at the principles of the 2005 Hampton report, which recommended to the then Labour Government that regulation should be accountable, consistent, proportionate, targeted and transparent. As my noble friend Lord Hunt said in his excellent contribution, we need to get away once and for all from the mantra “regulation bad, deregulation good” and have a grown-up conversation about how we rebalance our priorities not only for business but for the wider public as well.

Of course, in order for better regulation to work, there must always be the ability to enforce, as noble Lords have said, and we know that many years of austerity budgets have weakened that ability to enforce regulation. In the sector I know best, trading standards, I have seen over the past seven years the loss of more than 50% of the trading standards workforce from local government payrolls. It is not just about fewer people being there to protect British consumers and to enforce their rights, but the loss of so much skill, expertise and handed-down knowledge from a sector that goes back more than 100 years in its public enforcement role in this country. We have to take stock now of where our priorities lie and of what difficult decisions Governments will have to make on taxation versus public spending.

Many leaders in the regulatory world are increasingly looking to government for some urgent assurances about the future of regulation in a post-Brexit Britain. I am aware of the good work currently being done on this with reference to consumer protection by our House of Lords EU Justice Sub-Committee in taking evidence from organisations such as Citizens Advice, Which?, the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, the Ombudsman Services and others. As other noble Lords have said, the EU has been a positive and protective influence on the British consumer over the past 40 years. It is vital that, in the Brexit lift and shift operation envisaged for transposing EU rights and protections into British law under the repeal Act, consumer rights will not be watered down and diminished. The British people are in no mood to be ignored any longer on this matter of their rights and their personal health and safety, and they are looking to government for robust answers. It is such a shame that, just when those answers are being sought, we are leaving the EU framework of regulation—which we helped to build, by the way—which could help provide future solutions.