Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

New clause 2 aims to inject a shot of transparency into the Bill. It provides for a report on the operation of the Act. It follows recommendation 2 of the Regulatory Reform Committee’s report on the Bill, which stated"““We reaffirm the recommendation of our predecessor Committee that Departments should be assessed on their progress in removing unnecessary regulations and controls and not simply on their progress in simplifying measures. We recommend accordingly.””" Transparency is something on which we all agree. Allowing the greatest possible visibility for a process encourages good government and sound decision-making; allowing decisions to be made behind closed doors in Whitehall has the potential, as we all know, to have the opposite effect. Deregulation and better regulation are such important agendas that we must shine the light of scrutiny into the dark recesses of departmental decision-making. In the Committee debates, in which I participated, the Minister was very proud of the Government’s agenda. He said on 2 March:"““As a Government, we have committed ourselves to one of the most radical regulatory reform packages anywhere in the world””.—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 2 March 2006; c. 125.]" and he specifically talked about the culture change that he wished to inculcate in Whitehall. It seems to me that the best way of doing that is to ensure that as much light as possible is shone on the measures in the Act in respect of reducing regulations and burdens on business. The Regulatory Reform Committee suggested that one of the key reasons why the regulatory reform orders introduced under the Regulatory Reform Act 2001 had been far from successful was because of the lack of political will within Whitehall. The Committee claimed that low political importance was attached by Ministers and civil servants to propose areas ripe for regulatory reform as compared with bringing new legislation before the House. As the Minister acknowledged in Committee, a culture change in Whitehall is necessary and it should not be viewed as preferable for civil servants and Ministers to pin their careers on creating regulations and legislation rather than tidying up existing rules and scrapping obsolete or disproportionate burdens. Indeed, the latter is of far greater benefit to business than the former. The new clause would help to bring about the necessary culture change. It would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report and lay it before Parliament, which would provide the opportunity for the House to debate what Ministers would view as the Government’s success in reducing burdens. The report would detail what orders had been made and to what effect; what burdens had been removed, what simplified and what other progress had been made. The Government would therefore have to set out in stark detail exactly how deregulatory or regulatory it has been. That should provide a strong incentive for Ministers to encourage and prioritise measures that deregulate and reduce burdens on business, rather than the opposite, which seems the case at the moment. I shall deal now with new clauses 7 and 24. New clause 7 is effectively a sunset clause, which suggests sunsetting the Bill after five years. We make too little use of post-legislative scrutiny in the House and in this country, although we are getting better at employing pre-legislative scrutiny. The new clause would represent an important step forward in allowing Parliament and interest groups to input into legislation before it is finalised. We do not do enough to monitor the effectiveness of laws after they are on the statute book. A sunset clause is one form of post-legislative scrutiny; it is clearly not desirable for all legislation to include it because the increased work load on Parliament would be prohibitive. In certain cases, however, there is a clear argument for having sunset clauses, particularly for important and controversial legislation. Control orders immediately spring to mind. Sunset clauses can allow Parliament to look again at legislation and see if it wants to bring it back into force. As an alternative, new clause 24 is not a sunset clause, but a renewal clause, providing a separate option for increasing post-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and the Government may find it more amenable. Under the new clause, part 1 of the Bill, the most important part, must be brought before Parliament for reapproval or rejection at least every two years.