Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

I welcome the Minister to her new responsibilities. It is good to see her escape at last from the confines of the Whips Office, and we look forward to hearing her speak regularly. I join her in her thanks to the Select Committee Chairmen and all who have taken part in the discussions. The Bill was a mess at the beginning. It was not even the Bill on which the Government consulted. The proposals on which they consulted were very different. There has been a constant battle to try to get a Bill that really tackles deregulation, because we certainly need one—my goodness, we do. With a Government who are passing 15 regulations a day and increasing the burdens on business, whose extra costs are £50 billion since 1997, we need a Bill—but not a bad one. We struggled in Committee. I tabled all the amendments suggested by the Regulatory Reform Committee and many suggested by other Committees of the House. All were rejected; the then Minister used to described them as debating points. Recently, however, common sense has been brought to bear on the problems and there has been a climbdown. I welcome new clauses 19 and 20, but they came so late in the day that we have not been able to tackle all the problems with the provisions. We still have issues about how to tackle the problems of small business and how to filter Law Commission Bills so that the most controversial are properly debated. We still have issues about the procedures to be adopted to give the House a veto. There are great time pressures tonight, so I cannot explain all the reasons why the Bill is not yet ready to become law, but I cannot stomach the idea that it should go to the other place with the approval of the Opposition.