Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

The narrow definition did not allow us to implement specific regulatory reform orders, because of the narrow way in which a legal burden was defined and the way in which a proposal or regulatory reform order, if it only affected a Department, could not be progressed with. There have been specific examples, which I will bring to the hon. Gentleman’s attention in writing if he wishes, in which the Government wished to make common-sense, non-contentious simplification proposals, but because of the tight legal definition in the 2001 Act, we were not able to make the type of progress that we would all have wished to see.