Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

The Minister says that he wants to trade surveys, but the problem is that our position is getting worse. All the surveys show that the trend is adverse—it is against Britain and against competitiveness, and that is what needs changing. This really was a dreadful Bill, and we said from the outset that a range of changes needed to be made if it was to have any chance of making it on to the statute book. It needed to focus on deregulation, and it needed to have what I described as a veto. Luckily, Ministers are now prepared to consider that, although their proposals are still too restrictive. The Bill also needed to specify what kinds of laws cannot be dealt with using the order-making power. When first introduced, it said that a Minister could change any law in any way for any purpose. That was clearly unacceptable. Ministers are now moving to try to concentrate on deregulation and provide the veto. That is welcome. However, there remain some areas of concern that we will want to debate, not least the Law Commission proposals, where there seems to be very little to constrain what happens, and the veto, which seems to have been very tightly drawn. When the concessions started to be made, I was quite amused by the way in which Ministers described what they were doing. The hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr. Murphy), who struggled through this long campaign and must be relieved to have moved on, said:"““The time has come for those who claim to want to tackle bureaucracy to stand up and be counted, and let the Government of the day get on with the crucial task of cutting unnecessary red tape.””" The Minister, who is not in her place, said:"““I…stress the need now to get on with the task of removing barriers to productivity that will benefit hundreds of thousands of businesses, charities and public sector workers””." One begins to ask oneself where they have been for the past nine years as the Government have piled on the bureaucracy and the red tape, and which party has consistently argued for proper deregulatory measures during that time.