Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. A1: A1: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, leave out ““Better Regulation”” and insert ““De-regulation”” The noble Baroness said: This is a probing amendment to draw the attention of the Committee to the apparent disparity between the stated aims of the Bill in the Long Title and the clause that immediately succeeds it. Despite the Bill promising deregulation to make provision for, "““the reduction and removal of regulatory burdens””," the office to facilitate that is named the ““Local Better Regulation Office””. While Her Majesty’s Government may have pulled the wool over the eyes of the noble Lord, Lord Jones of Birmingham, they have not succeeded with us on these Benches. Better regulation is not deregulation. I also suggest through this amendment’s removal of the adjective ““better”” that, as the office stands in the Bill, ““Local Better Regulation Office”” is a misnomer for something that will produce more hideously complex and heavily bureaucratic regulation. While the Bill promises a change from Her Majesty’s Government’s past record on regulation, I fear that no such promise will be fulfilled. This is the third piece of supposedly deregulatory legislation to pass through Parliament since 2000. In 2001, Her Majesty’s Government introduced an Act that produced only 27 deregulations in four years. In the same period, more than 600 new regulations were introduced. How can a Bill that creates a fantastically complicated primary authority partnership, which potentially allows one local authority to have jurisdiction over another, even pretend that it is deregulatory? I believe that the Bill will cause resentment between local authorities, resentment between big businesses competing to secure the best primary authority and resentment from small businesses in relation to their larger competitors, which will have an unfair chance to choose their primary authority. All that resentment will burden the Local Better Regulation Office with more complaints to field and more and more disputes to oversee. I wonder whether I am being unreasonable to suggest that, cast in this problem-fixing role, the office will be inhibited from proaction in either properly implementing better regulation or seeing whether better regulation could be implemented. As I said at Second Reading—I shall reiterate it—all that the Bill does is to introduce more regulation in an optimistic bid to mend a broken system. I would be much reassured if the Minister could tell me where in the Bill is the impetus to deregulate. I do not find it anywhere. I beg to move.