Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

The wise words of the Father of the House ought to have struck home, even if the words of the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) and my own do not. We need careful scrutiny of part 1, and that should be on the Floor of the House to enable all Members to participate if they so wish. I have already apologised to the Minister, to the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire and to the Chair, and I now apologise to the House for the fact that I will, unfortunately and exceptionally, have to miss the later speeches in this debate. I hope that hon. Members will recognise that that is not the way I usually do business in the House, and I regret that I will not be able to observe the normal courtesies of the House. I commend the Minister for introducing the Bill in his usual way. I am almost beginning to forget that there ever was a Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and to wonder what the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster did, but we shall no doubt see a successor eventually, or perhaps not. Who knows? In any case, a Bill that declares itself to be a vehicle for regulatory reform is transparently a good thing. It is the parliamentary equivalent of motherhood and apple pie to say that we all want to reduce the burdens of regulation. However, successive Governments fail to do that and there have been incremental increases in the burden. Any Bill, the prospectus of which is to reduce the regulatory burden, should be welcomed, but—and it is a big but—as the poet had it,"““timeo Danaos et dona ferentis””—" I fear a Greek bearing gifts or, to put it in modern form, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. The Bill is a classic case of that. We look for consolidation of regulation, and for reduction or extinction of regulation. That is an extraordinarily important part of the process. We are very good at creating regulation, but not at looking back to see whether it is still relevant to the purposes for which it was first introduced, or whether it is simply a relic that has become a burden without benefit. If the Bill were entirely about that, I would welcome it. Parts of the Bill are useful—for example, I want to see an accelerated method for bringing Law Commission proposals into law. The proposals on translating European law into British law are not exceptional, apart from the fact that they have not been coupled to the fundamental reform of how we do the job in this House. If anything is desperately needed, it is a better way of examining European regulation and considering how it will apply, whether it has been added to and the effect that it will have on British businesses and British individuals.