Deregulation Bill
Debate between Oliver Letwin and Lord Mann(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Letwin
My hon. Friend raises an immensely important point. I was going to talk about it later, but let me deal with it now. He is absolutely right, and I am not talking of a few cases. We came across—and we continue to come across—many, many cases on which, given our way, we would certainly have deregulated, yet we found that directives made it impossible for us to do what we would have liked to have done. That is, of course, one of the reasons why, if there is a Conservative Government after the next general election, we will be seeking to renegotiate our relationship with the EU and then—as long as the Opposition do not prevent this—putting that to the British public in a referendum. It is also one of the reasons why we are trying to pass the referendum Bill right now, and we will bring it back and do so.
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
It would be helpful if the right hon. Gentleman could tell us the number of regulations that he wishes to abolish but cannot. Precisely how many are there? Perhaps he could produce a list.
Mr Letwin
That is a very tantalising thought, so I shall go back and see whether that is possible. I am sure we can put together a list. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman or Opposition Front Benchers would like to see it very much, but it is extremely clear that there are large numbers of cases in which it would have been desirable to do things, but it is impossible to do so because of the structure of directives that we inherited. Most of those directives were signed up to willingly by the previous Government. It is also the case—
Mr Letwin
The hon. Gentleman does not need to exert himself; I will give way to him again.
Of course, some EU regulation is perfectly sensible, but the problem is that much of it, unfortunately, forces us to do things in ways that we would much prefer were not the case. I suspect that, if the hon. Gentleman were to look at some of that regulation, he would agree with me.
John Mann
I certainly would not wish to offend the Minister; I merely want an answer. He said “many”; he said “many, many”; and I think he said “excessive”. How many regulations—he has been through them all—has he not been able to deal with in the Bill because of European legislation? Is it 10, 20, 50, 100 or 1,000?
Mr Letwin
I will send the hon. Gentleman a list. It will not be exhaustive, but I suspect it will contain hundreds, rather than tens, of cases for which we would have wished to do something different. Of course we have not kept an exhaustive tally—there is no point, because we cannot change those things in domestic legislation, which is what the Bill is about.
John Mann
We are now dealing with the most extraordinary Conservative party. When the people being brought in are self-employed—and that is not an unusual situation—it depends what industry they are working in—[Interruption.] They are the contractors who are brought in. The hon. Gentleman may wish to make pedantic points, rather than getting to the heart of the weakness of the Bill.
Mr Letwin
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I would scarcely have engaged in diminishing the brilliance of his eloquence were it not for the fact that it may be that someone reading Hansard would be misled into supposing that what he is talking about had any kind of rhyme or reason in it at all. Actually, if he was the employer, he would continue to be covered by health and safety legislation as before. That will always be the case for the employer, regardless of whether the people working for an employer are contracted to him as self-employed or otherwise. If he is really serious about this, he will attend to the fact that what we are doing is removing Health and Safety at Work, etc. 1974 Act provisions for those self-employed people themselves in those occupations which are not prescribed and are, therefore, without risk to other people.
John Mann
We will see which are included and which are not. When the Minister talked about mountain guides, he gave the example of a regulator that does not exist for that profession. That was the example he gave to promote his Bill and demonstrate that it would be regulated. Wrong. That regulator does not exist in relation to mountain guides; it is an entirely different body with nothing whatever to do with them.
Perhaps Conservative Members would like to listen, because I have worked in this situation. For example, when working to set up a concert there will be a range of different people: some will be self-employed and some will be employed. If overall responsibility for health and safety is removed from the self-employed, that will put everybody at risk, because that responsibility will no longer be defined. That is a fundamental flaw in the Bill that the Ministers clearly have not thought through.
The Minister for Government Policy put up the wrong regulator in the example I cited. I personally negotiated with the previous Government the exemption from the working at heights directive on precise technicalities. I demonstrated that it was not safer to be included. Despite the perception, it would not have provided health and safety. In climbing, there are two ropes. The worst-case contingency training did not allow for one of those ropes snapping, so the directive was a nonsense. It was not a nonsense in terms of the principle of the law; it was a nonsense in the detail. The principle of deregulation should be that if regulation is not effective—when it is useless, when it does not work and when it is outdated—it should be removed, as has been the case for stuff going back 150 years.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Oliver Letwin and Lord Mann(14 years, 6 months ago)
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John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
11. What recent assessment he has made of the contribution of Cabinet Committees, Sub-Committees and working groups to the work of his Department.
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Mr Oliver Letwin)
I am very conscious of your admonition to be brief, Mr Speaker, so I shall just say to the hon. Gentleman that we have a rather more modest ambition, which is not to ask what the Cabinet can do for our Department, but what our Department can do for the Cabinet.
Mr Letwin
I am happy to tell the hon. Gentleman that I am actually the unofficial bag carrier to the Prime Minister; I do not even qualify as the official one. We have organised ourselves in a way that means that we have cut to the bare minimum the number of groups that we operate. We have a far tighter Cabinet Committee system than that which was operated under the previous Government, because, as I said to the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), who asked an earlier question, we are absolutely determined that our Cabinet Committees be genuine decision-making bodies, not merely a dignified part of the constitution.