Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 14th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I believe that the Minister is today presenting his first major piece of legislation in his new department. Over the past two or three years I have watched him get his head around energy policy in DECC. In his new department, he has quite a task with this Bill because he has got to get his head around everything from the obscurities of employment law to, as we just heard, the intricacies of copyright law in its various dimensions. I wish him the best of luck because he has got what I will call, for the purposes of neutrality, a patchwork of a Bill. There are some attractive patches and some less attractive ones. It seems to be an amalgam of old ideas, which have been around the department for a long time, and some rather barmy new ones. I have to take at face value the view of the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, that Vince Cable has managed to resist the barmier elements of the Beecroft report, although some of them actually do appear here in one way or another. There are also some areas which we all agree would be useful.

We have, in the Bill, the good, the bad and the ugly. If it helps the Minister, I will, rather than dwell on any individual area, help to categorise the various parts of the Bill from my point of view. I start with the good; at least in conception. I very much welcome the announcement of the Green Investment Bank. I welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Kelvin, said earlier about it getting off the ground. However, it is not yet a real bank. A bank which cannot—at least at this stage—borrow on the market and thus multiply its leverage of private investment is not a real bank. In some ways, it is not as green as all that. We need some criteria for its investments that relate, for example, to targets for carbon saving and other resource reduction. This part of the Bill will need strengthening.

Likewise, I welcome the big picture in relation to the competition regime. I agree with the merger of the OFT and the Competition Commission and regret that I part company with my noble friend Lord Borrie on that matter. It should add coherence and speed up investigations. I also welcome the dropping of the dishonesty requirement in relation to cartels which has been an inhibition to interventions in this area. My concern is about what will happen to the bits of the OFT’s responsibility relating to consumer protection, enforcement of trading standards and consumer education which drop out of the new organisation. They are coming forward in a number of different respects but are, essentially, being privatised or localised. I am not necessarily against that but I will need some reassurances. I recall my previous interest as chair of Consumer Focus, a body which is imminently to disappear, greatly reducing the amount of consumer protection or, at least, consumer advocacy. I also declare my role as honorary vice-president of the Trading Standards Institute. I shall definitely return to this whole area of consumer protection and the competition provisions at a later stage.

Some aspects of the Bill are mixed or inadequate. On the contentious area of copyright, I support the broad sweep of the Hargreaves recommendations and the adoption of the IPO proposals on orphan works and collective licensing. However, from a personal point of view at least, I am deeply suspicious of any attempt to extend copyright protection and I require a better justification for it than we have yet received. I regret the failure largely to come to grips with the new reality of copyright protection in a digital age. We rehearsed this ground under the previous Government with the Digital Economy Act and I fear that I shall once again probably part company with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on aspects of that. In terms of the balance sought by his colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, I shall probably have slightly more sympathy with the under-30s, although I am evidently not one of them, than I do with some of the more aggressive antics of rights holders in this respect. We certainly need a new balance that reflects the reality of the internet.

My noble friend Lord Gavron and the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, have already welcomed the provisions on director remuneration but wished to extend them. This is one of the great difficulties of our time. The impact of the level of director remuneration on the morale of the workforce and the attitude of the population as a whole to our leaders of industry needs to be seriously tackled. I am glad that the Government are at least beginning to do so.

I now come on to the bad bits of the Bill. Most of the provisions on equality fall into this category. As the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, movingly pointed out, the narrowing of the scope of ECHR interventions, and of its support, advice and conciliation services, is going to set back the mainstreaming of equality issues in terms of gender, race and disability. The commission needs to have independence and general responsibility. The threat that the Bill presents to both is of considerable concern to many around the House.

Most of the employment law provisions fall into the “bad” category. Indeed, I should probably move them into the “ugly” category. It is not just these provisions which are of concern. They are part of a wider strategy. I hope this is not being done as consciously by the Government as the word “strategy” implies, but when we look at what has happened under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act and the Welfare Reform Act in terms of access to tribunals and redress, we see a whole range of reductions in access to justice and redress for those in the most vulnerable and least powerful negotiating positions in our society. It is a strategy of which the Government ought to be ashamed. I am sorry to see bits of it in the Bill.

Ugliest of the lot are the provisions referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Low, relating to Clauses 61, which appears to provide that victims—physical, mental, financial or mortal—of the failure of private or public corporations to fulfil their statutory responsibilities will, in most cases, no longer be entitled to compensation. That takes us back more than 100 years, and it is something that I had not expected the Government to bring forward. This issue has not had adequate coverage. It was a late entrant to the Bill in another place. We need seriously to consider whether those provisions ought to be part of the Bill.

This is a bit of a tinkerer’s charter. It tinkers with a lot of bits of legislation in areas for which the Minister’s department is responsible. I am sure that Vince Cable is capable of doing better than this, but I recognise that he is somewhat hobbled in his intentions to turn the department into a driver for economic recovery and a provider of business confidence and jobs. He is hobbled by the Treasury, by some of his colleagues, by the right wing of the Conservative Party in another place and partly by the department, which—even going back decades, from the Board of Trade onwards—has never quite managed to translate itself into a real engine of economic growth.

The Bill is, frankly, one of the least impressive exigencies from that department, and it certainly will not fulfil the role of developing a proper and effective industrial strategy and giving confidence back to the population and businesses of this country.