Deregulation Bill

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I had the privilege of serving on the Bill committee under the superb chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I should also like to pay tribute to the clerks who backed us up. They did a superb job on a very tight schedule—we were given the best part of just over 12 weeks. The Government set us the target of reporting by Christmas. We stuck to that target and I think we did as good a job as any committee could hope to do in that time span. We recognised that this is a very important part of the Government’s programme. I pay tribute to the Ministers who gave evidence to us. I commiserate with the Minister who will take the Bill through in all its detail, but it is a very important part of the Government’s legislation and one that I greatly welcome.

However, something changed en route and it appears that, in reality, we looked at only two-thirds of the Bill at best. As someone who has been Chairman of Ways and Means in the other place, the situation jars with me when colleagues from all sides have worked extremely hard to take evidence, to listen to it, to reflect on and question it, and have proposed to the Government of the day that certain changes should be made. In fairness, the Government respond very positively in almost all areas to the committee’s evidence and recommendations. However, we then discover in Committee that a number of new clauses appear on the horizon, which get a fairly peremptory examination. Even more surprising, we discover on Report that new clauses appear in the Bill.

I must say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that, in all conscience, the Government are not being fair to the public, who justifiably want to give their voice on clauses that come forward, and I do not think the Government are being fair to Parliament as a whole. Inevitably, I suspect, that will mean that the Committee stage will take rather longer here than it otherwise would. Looking back on the previous Session, I seem to remember that we had to break early because there was no work to be done. The same applied at the other end. So I question why, when we had a perfectly good, succinct, tight Bill, the decision was taken to add other bits. Was it that certain departments of state were a bit slothful in coming forward or was it that Ministers got a little too enthusiastic? In future, I hope that there will be an annual Bill that is tightly drawn. As the noble Lord said in his introductory comments, it is the deregulatory dimension that we all want in Parliament, rather than the repositioning of existing legislation. I hope that can be really tightly drawn and stuck to. That way, across government as a whole, we would be doing the public a great service.

I will just mention three other areas. First, in the Law Commission, there is a body to review laws that are out of date. We took evidence and, frankly, we were somewhat aghast at how long it took to do its job. Parliament, particularly Ministers, should be putting pressure on the Law Commission to move faster. The Law Commission said to us that it did not have the resources to do it. If it is beneficial to the public, particularly the public purse, Ministers and the Law Commission need to sit down and find a way of making what is called the SLRs work better. We said in our original report that there should be an annual SLR Bill. I do not need an answer today—my colleagues and I would like the answer in writing—but my question is: have there been consultations with the Law Commission and, if so, what were the results of those deliberations?

Secondly, we received evidence from BALPPA, which regulates the leisure park industry in our seaside towns up and down the country. It gears up its programme of events, et cetera, to the school holidays. We questioned the association quite deeply because the Bill proposes that we should deregulate school terms. I am a grandfather, and there must be other grandfathers here, and fathers. Honestly, what we really want is predictability. If you have a boy and a girl, you want to know that they and their friends will be on holiday at the same time. I hope that we can have another look at that. Certainly, if you look at the evidence from the USA, where they deregulated around Labor Day, absolute chaos flowed and it adversely affected the tourism industries. I ask the Minister: has there been any economic assessment of the impact of deregulating school holidays on tourism jobs in the seaside areas? I think that is important.

My third point concerns the economic growth duty, which I spoke about at some length in the committee. I believe it is absolutely fundamental that every department of state thinks about the economic impact of what it does. That applies to the whole lot. We had what I would call some howls of protest from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, saying that we would be interfering with its role in life; in particular, it might be struck off the list in Europe. I totally fail to see how it would interfere with any of the human rights bodies if we—society—asked them to reflect at length on the impact of anything they do, propose or criticise. That is what we recommended in our report and it seems entirely justifiable from society’s point of view.