Legislation: Complexity

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Bates and endorse enthusiastically not only what he said but what has been said by my other two colleagues who have contributed to this very timely debate.

I want to take up the point made by my noble friend Lord Phillips about the context and the consequence for the public of some of the work that has been undertaken for this report. In doing so, I refer to the Audit of Political Engagement published recently by the Hansard Society, of which I am a vice-chair, which I think is extremely important and, in some respects, encouraging. Mostly, however, it is discouraging. Mostly it says that people are disengaged for some of the reasons to which my noble friends have referred. However, in a number of ways there is new engagement and increased engagement. For example, 42% of the public say that they would like to be involved in national decision-making—up 9% compared with the previous year—and 47% agree that Parliament holds government to account, up from 38% last year. Fifty-five per cent agree that Parliament debates and makes decisions about issues that matter to them, up from 49% the previous year. But most important of all, 55% of the public agree that politics and government seem so complicated that,

“a person like me cannot really understand what is going on”.

That is the critical consequence of the complexity to which this excellent report refers.

I want to refer to one or two of the examples given in the report. Incidentally, the authors of the report show that they are masters of complexity. I am not allowed to wave about my visual aid but page 16 sets out the legal effects of the Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community Enterprise) Act 2004. I do not understand how that got past anybody seeking to reduce complexity.

Mr Heaton’s foreword to the report is extremely salutary. I hope that your Lordships will forgive me if I refer again to his absolutely critical paragraph. He says:

“Excessive complexity hinders economic activity, creating burdens for individuals, businesses and communities. It obstructs good government. It undermines the rule of law”.

That is the context in which we should look at this issue. I pay tribute to the work that has already been done, I understand, as a result of this activity by the parliamentary draftsmen. I shall refer to one particular example of the way in which they have looked at this issue: gold-plating, which my noble friend Lord Bates spoke about briefly. Gold-plating has been around for a long time and I congratulate the Government on seeking to deal with it. When I was responsible for agriculture for my party in the other place, I recall looking at a number of directives as they emerged from Brussels, then looking at the regulations as they appeared in the United Kingdom.

I was not at all surprised to read in this document that in 2003 there was an average “elaboration ratio” for the UK of 330%. In an extreme example, directive 2002/42/EC consisted of 1,167 words in its original English text, but resulted in 27,000 words of implementing regulation in the UK. I recall talking to a previous Minister of Agriculture shortly before that, who told me that he got so fed up with the gold-plating going on in his department that he instituted a format for reviewing every directive that came from Brussels. Alongside it, his civil servants had to put what they proposed to add and the resulting consequences in terms of length and complexity. He or one of his Ministers then had to tick off and approve the sequence as acceptable.

The most significant thing he told me was that within three days of losing office, the civil servants abolished the system that he had instituted, because they were so pleased with the way in which they could add excessive requirements to what emerged from Brussels. It is a well-known fact that throughout the other member states of the European Union, directives, for example on abattoirs that I was concerned with, were a matter of reducing responsibilities at a more local level, but in the United Kingdom everything was centralised and imposed much more rigorously.

As has already been said, pre-legislative scrutiny is an extremely important way in which we should take responsibility for removing unnecessary complexity. It should be absolutely explicit at the outset that one of the responsibilities of a Joint Committee is to reduce complexity in draft legislation. I am an enthusiastic supporter of Joint Committees—I sat on several of them—because MPs and Peers educate each other when we sit together. As my noble friend Lord Norton has said, it is also true that both Houses have been asked to think carefully about improving the quality of legislation, most recently by the Select Committee in the other place, but before that the committee chaired with such distinction by Dr Tony Wright. Our own Leader’s Group, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, looked hard at this and made a substantial suggestion, which I am afraid has so far not been implemented in this House. It is about improving the quality of legislation and recommended a legislative standards committee in recommendation 16 of its report. Sadly, that has not been pursued, which is a great pity.

I have one simple, practical suggestion to make. Again, I am not allowed to wave my visual aid, so I shall have to ask the Minister to look at it later and take it seriously. In preparing a recent draft Bill with assistance from Members of the other two parties in the other place, my extremely able and far more technically competent assistant Alex Davies, found it was quite possible to put the Explanatory Notes alongside the clauses. That one small step, allowing you to read across from Clause 9 to what Clause 9 actually means, would be hugely more accessible to the general public—indeed to professionals and those in business outside this House—than the present arrangements. With draft Bills, government Bills, Private Members’ Bills and secondary legislation, the Explanatory Notes can without great difficulty be side-by-side with the appropriate part of that legislation.

That is a very practical suggestion which I give to your Lordships’ House. I will sell it to the Government for only a penny, but I would like to make sure that the credit is not given to me, but to my extremely able assistant. This is a timely debate. What is so interesting about it, referred to by the three previous speakers and me, is that we in this House could do more to improve the situation. It is not just a question of passing the buck to the professional parliamentary draftsmen. It is not even just a government responsibility, it is the responsibility of the two Houses of Parliament to make our legislation more accessible and less complex.