Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

I accept that that can and sometimes does happen; I would dispute that that is routinely what happens. There are, in some respects, better ways of doing it. They have been captured to a degree by the way in which regulatory reform orders work, so I am not averse to exploring that procedure further. The fantasy that I sometimes have is of a Government coming to the House with a Queen’s Speech that says, ““This year, my Government will introduce no new Bills. We are simply going to make sure that the existing legislation works well, that our administrative systems are working efficiently and that we do not return to new legislation until we are sure that our existing legislation is of a certain standard.”” Of course, that is a fantasy that will never be realised either from this Government or any other, but it is a discipline. There is something about the machine that simply has to drive ever onwards. The virility test for Ministers and for Departments is how much they can get in the legislative programme this year, not whether what they got in last year is working well and doing the things that they said it was going to do. At some point, we shall have to get hold of that huge issue, which goes against the culture of every Government and of the whole Government machine.