Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

My hon. Friend has put his finger on an important problem. I remember when I was a Minister cursed with the task of transposing such directives into national law. On one occasion, I was so frustrated by what I thought was the over-regulatory nature of our draft—it was something like a 100-page draft to implement a 10-page directive—that I said, ““Let’s just implement the directive as it stands, because it is clearly less onerous than the civil service draft we have come up with. I then received extremely strong and pompous legal advice—I suppose that I am not meant to reveal this, so I shall call it non-legal advice—the burden of which was that it was wrong to make the directive the law in Britain, because it was so badly drafted that we could face infraction proceedings. It was apparently seen to be the task of British civil servants to try to make good law out of bad and to ensure that it fitted into our British legal codes.