Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

May I set at rest the mind of the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper)? I am quite sure that I speak for my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) when I say that his earlier comment was a compliment, rather than an attempt to deprecate the hon. Gentleman’s absence. We genuinely missed the hon. Gentleman, who made a valuable contribution in Committee and has made another one today in introducing these new clauses, dealing as they do with transparency and openness. They also make an at least crude attempt to apply a degree of post-legislative scrutiny to this part of the Bill. In the spirit of openness and transparency, I would have liked to have had a letter in similar terms to the letter referred to earlier by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope). I am little surprised to learn that Liberal Democrat Front Benchers were not accorded that courtesy on this occasion; perhaps the letter is somewhere in transmission at this very moment. One would usually expect to be copied into correspondence dealing with the substance of a Bill. As the hon. Member for Forest of Dean correctly said, new clause 2 requires that a report be made by the Secretary of State on the Bill’s operation. Previous deregulatory legislation—indeed, all sorts of legislation—has not lived up to its expectations. For instance, one of my continuing criticisms is the raft of Home Office legislation, to which I referred in yesterday’s debate. Large parts of it were described as urgent matters that needed the House’s attention and which were absolutely crucial to the well-being and safety of the population—however, years later they still have not been implemented. If such provisions are urgently needed and vital to public safety, one has to ask why they have not been implemented."Similarly, in dealing with this legislation we are entitled to ask, after a period, what the Government have done with this power. Have they used it effectively? Do we have a programme of deregulation, or is the power being used in abeyance as a reserve power—as with the change to Standing Orders in order to implement Law Commission reports, to which reference was made yesterday—rather than to achieve the objectives that we and the Government share? I therefore think that new clause 2 has a great deal to commend it." I come now to the issue of sunset clauses. In his intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge was right to distinguish between the powers that lapse as a result of a sunset clause and the orders introduced under those powers. If the Bill becomes an Act, Ministers may be tempted to argue against its renewal on the ground that we would thus be left defenceless against overburdensome legislation and regulation. However, that argument would be spurious, as there is nothing in this and other new clauses in the group that would cause the regulations or the deregulation made under the powers contained in the Bill to be annulled. They would merely enable the House to consider whether assurances given by the Government during the Bill’s passage had been implemented in practice. They would allow us to determine whether promises had been kept and the Bill’s purposes adhered to, and to ascertain whether we had the sort of deregulatory programme and the lack of excess that the Government have assured us all along was their intention. That is a modest ambition. In one way, it might be a desirable concept to sunset all regulations from their origin, but that might run the risk of causing administrative chaos. We understand the complexity of the drafting required to produce a satisfactory response, but the lapsing of a power would not create immediate difficulties. The new clause means that the Government would be required to come back to the House and say to hon. Members, ““This is how we have used this power. You have seen it in action, and will understand that it was used entirely properly and for its intended purpose. It has worked well, and we ask the House to renew it.”” Alternatively, the House could say to the Government, ““You told us that you would use the power for one purpose, but in fact you have used it for quite another”” or, ““You told us this power was needed urgently, yet you have not used it at all.”” The new clause would enable the House to have control of what the Executive want to do. I would always argue that the legislature should have control of what the Executive do, especially in respect of the procedures of this House. More than anything else, the Bill is about those procedures. It is therefore entirely appropriate for Parliament to decide whether a power is working satisfactorily, and I am happy to lend my support to the suggestions made by the hon. Member for Forest of Dean.