Deregulation Bill

Debate between Yasmin Qureshi and Caroline Lucas

Monday 3rd February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I beg to move,

That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Deregulation Bill because, whilst acknowledging that removing unnecessary burdens on small businesses is welcome, the Bill fails to recognise the social, economic and environmental benefits of effective regulation and contains a number of extremely damaging proposals including: the watering down of safety protections for employees that will leave workers at greater risk of injury, ill-health and abuse; the erosion of protection of journalistic sources and against police seizure of journalistic material, which threatens the basis of the free press; and the imposition of a growth duty on non-economic regulators such as Natural England and the Health and Safety Executive, which is irresponsible and risks undermining their core roles; further considers that this Bill is another illustration of a Government which is embarking on a deregulatory path without due consideration of warnings, including from businesses, that effective regulation is essential to create jobs and innovation and that ripping up vital green legislation risks locking the UK into polluting industrial processes for decades to come, jeopardising future competitiveness, damaging the UK’s attractiveness for green investment, and undermining new industries; and further believes that this Bill represents a race to the bottom and an obsession with GDP growth at any cost which is not in the public interest.

I tabled this reasoned amendment because I believe that the Bill should not be given a Second Reading. I listened to the Minister characterising those of us who have signed the amendment as somehow being of the far left. If that is the case, that category would have to include groups such as the UK Green Building Council, the Aldersgate Group and many other business groups right across the spectrum that have deep concerns about the Bill’s direction of travel.

I did not table this reasoned amendment without giving consideration to those parts of the Bill that are welcome and uncontroversial. Certainly, some parts of the Bill are completely fine. For example, it is cold homes week and many MPs and charities are working hard to highlight fuel poverty in cold homes. Scarves are a symbol of the campaign and people have been knitting away in the past few weeks to draw attention to the need to tackle fuel poverty. I am sure that nobody would object to the clauses in the Bill that would remove restrictions on the selling of knitting yarn. They will allow small and large businesses engaged in the selling of yarn better to meet their customers’ needs. Other provisions are similarly sensible, such as those that would facilitate the recording of public rights of way, and I give them my full support. Removing genuinely defunct legislation from the statute book also makes sense.

My worry is that the basis of the Bill is incredibly simplistic and crude: in the Government’s mind more regulation is bad and less regulation is good, without ever questioning the kind of regulation. Is it smart regulation? What is the purpose of the regulation? Will it actually generate more development? Will it incentivise industry? Will it provide industry with the level playing ground it often asks for? Instead of this nuanced approach, we have a complete knee-jerk reaction that says, “Regulation is bad, deregulation is good” and proceeds in a simple way.

I will make comments on three areas of the Bill. First, I want to cover some specific provisions—I will outline just a few. Secondly, I want to talk about the fundamentally flawed premise on which the Bill is based: it fails to recognise that some regulation can be good for business and job creation, as well as for consumers. Thirdly, I will say a few words about the new growth duty on non-economic regulators, which I fear will interfere with, and impinge on, their ability independently to carry out crucial roles, including: the Care Quality Commission protecting public health; Natural England protecting our environment; the Health and Safety Executive protecting employees and others from harm at work; or the Equality and Human Rights Commission challenging discrimination and protecting human rights. This growth duty is just the latest manifestation of an obsession with short-term GDP growth at any cost, and that is simply not in the public interest.

First, I will focus on just a few of the harmful provisions that I think Ministers are trying to ram through in the name of deregulation. The Bill narrows the application of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, following the 2011 Löfstedt review. The Bill effectively exempts self-employed people from health and safety law where their activities do not put another person at risk. On the surface, one could ask what could be wrong with that. The problem is that the changes in the Bill are completely unnecessary, because the only time the 1974 Act can be used is when a person does put another person at risk. No self-employed person has ever been prosecuted or threatened with prosecution for risking just their own health. Right now, the law is straightforward and it works. The Bill will create not only confusion, but complacency.

Let us not forget that the fatality, injury and ill-health rate for the self-employed is already much higher than that for other sectors. Some of the more dangerous industries, such as agriculture and construction, have a high proportion of self-employed people working in them. There is an obvious risk that people who control the workplace where self-employed people work may think, wrongly, that they do not need to be as concerned about fulfilling their duty of care to the self-employed. The TUC has made this point clear, as have the majority of respondents to the HSE consultation, who rejected the very option we now have put before us. The health and safety professional body, the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, warns:

“This is a very short-sighted and misleading move, it won’t actually help anyone; it won’t support business; but it will cause general confusion.”

As well as health and safety protections, it is also reasonable to ensure that employees do not face discrimination in the workplace, yet the Government are trying to take a massive backward step in the fight against discrimination, too, by removing the powers of employment tribunals to issue wider recommendations on gender, race or other forms of discrimination in the workplace.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

As the hon. Lady will be aware, employment tribunals made these recommendations only 19 times in 2012, and in fact employers often welcome them because they help to resolve many underlying issues that often lead to discrimination claims being made in the first place.

[Caroline Lucas]

That is a clear example of where the status quo is not causing a problem. The Government are looking for problems to solve where there are no problems, and instead are creating a whole lot more.

Affordable housing could be another casualty of this obsession with deregulation. Reducing the eligibility period for the right to buy could seriously undermine housing associations’ ability to provide affordable housing and make it more, not less, difficult for housing associations to do business, contrary to the Government’s own apparent aims. It would be interesting to hear what assessment the Minister has made of the impact on the Government’s ambition to deliver 165,000 affordable homes over the Parliament. Why did they not consult housing associations on the impact of the measure before bringing it forward?

On the environment, in May 2010 in the coalition agreement, the Government committed to encouraging community-owned renewable energy schemes, and that is being delivered with the launch of the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s community energy strategy. However, the reduction of energy and climate change duties, set out in clause 28, appears specifically to contradict that commitment and undermine the recent statements supporting community energy made by Ministers.

On public participation in decision making, the Bill weakens the Government’s overall consultation duties by removing specified statutory duties to consult. The majority of the consultation requirements to be removed by the Bill relate to the environment and greatly reduce the participation rights of affected people, including regulators such as Natural England. Consultation is a core element of democratic government and serves as one of the main ways the Government can be held to account for their actions. It also contributes to increasing public trust in government and is essential for developing policy and legislation, because it provides access to wider sources of information, opinions, and potential issues and solutions. The Government risk undermining their legitimacy and triggering a public outcry by removing statutory consultation requirements. The statement in schedule 15 that the Government consider these statutory requirements to consult as unnecessary is neither satisfactory nor sufficient to justify that removal.

More specifically, the UK is a signatory to the Aarhus convention, which binds the UK to provide the public with, among other things, a right to participate in decision making in any proposed activity that might have a significant effect on the environment and/or during the preparation of plans and programmes relating to the environment. The removal of the requirement to consult on the exercise of various powers relating to the environment directly conflicts with the requirements of the Aarhus convention, which stems from principle 10 of the Rio declaration, which opens with the declaration:

“Environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level.”

The Government should justify the removal of each of the consultation requirements and confirm how the UK’s public participation obligation, pursuant to the convention, will be discharged.

We have already heard quite a bit about clause 47. I was going to say that hidden in the Bill was a provision seeking to repeal some of the journalistic protections in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 that currently ensure proper and fair judicial scrutiny before police applications to obtain journalistic material are granted. I am grateful for the fact that the Minister is attempting to reassure his own Back Benchers on this issue, but it worries me that only at the last moment, when the Bill has got to this stage, is he proposing further consultation on this important part of the Bill. That strikes me as odd, as many organisations have been extremely vocal in raising this issue over several months. The Newspaper Society, The Guardian and many others have warned about the impact of closed material proceedings and so on.

I am grateful that, at the last minute, the Government are looking again at this matter and saying they will consult again, but that raises questions about how many other parts of the Bill will have unintended consequences.