Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In his four or five years in the House, he has made a significant impact on the way in which important and vulnerable workers are protected. He is right that we must not only weigh up the financial cost but the benefits, real or perceived, when identifying new regulations or seeking to remove regulations. I know that he has paid close attention to such matters, and I know from our conversations over the past few days that he continues to do so. I believe that the Regulatory Reform Committee and its equivalent in another place provide the most effective forum in which to do that. I am determined that the proper role of Parliament should be preserved, and I have insisted that the formal preconditions on orders are retained or adapted to remove the narrow and technical concept of burdens. Indeed, those safeguards now apply comprehensively to capture all of the impacts imposed by orders. There is also a new safeguard—no order will be made where there is a better alternative to legislation. I want to examine in more detail the inadequacies of the 2001 Act and how the new Bill will remedy those. It was always our intention to review the groundbreaking powers in the 2001 Act and to assess how well they work. Both Houses asked for that undertaking during the passage of the Act. The review, conducted with Departments and drawing on parliamentary Committee reports, was published in July last year, and highlighted some positive aspects to the RRO powers, pointing out that some worthwhile regulatory reforms had been delivered. However, the review also identified some serious flaws in the existing RRO power. First, the concept of legal burdens, on which the regulatory reform power is based, is narrow and technically complicated. Departments have found it difficult to make many of their proposals fit those narrow requirements, no matter how beneficial the proposals would be from a better regulation perspective. For instance, the current power can remove a statutory requirement, but it cannot make a statutory requirement easier to comply with. The current power must also be related to an activity, which meant that proposals to improve personal insolvency administration orders could not be taken forward. Secondly, technical restrictions such as the two-year rule, which prevents a regulation from being reformed until it has been in effect for two years, have blocked useful reform. The need for reform of a regulation often becomes apparent a lot sooner, and it makes no sense to hold back reform in that way. Thirdly, the technical nature of the Act has meant that the work involved in preparing orders is not proportionate to the effect of the orders; nor is that analysis focused on the merits of the proposal as it should be. That has been both a deterrent to using the powers and a significant factor in the length of time that Departments have taken to prepare and present proposals to Parliament. It can often take longer to pass an RRO than a whole Bill. Clearly, that is disproportionate for proposals that are often minor and uncontroversial. For example, the RRO reforming business tenancies, a relatively straightforward reform, took more than two and a half years to complete. The review left the Government in no doubt that the RRO power needed to be reformed. It led to proposals that were put out to consultation last year. That consultation drew a wide range of responses from the business community and representative groups, and demonstrated strong support for our proposals.