Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

I hope that I am following the proper procedure if I make one or two comments now. The noble Lord says that this is no place in which to have the argument about centralisation and decentralisation, but I remember very well a speech by the noble Lord, Lord Desai, in which he said more or less that while you may think that you can pursue decentralisation, you should not have the slightest hope that it will ever work. It was an extremely good speech, but of course it was completely wrong. He has also said that one government after another get beguiled by the need to keep powers in the hands of Secretaries of State and to be good centralisers. To a certain extent he is absolutely right, but there is always hope of amendment of life. Under the new leader of the Conservative Party, I think that we might just possible get there. I want to touch on just a couple of difficulties before responding to the full and helpful reply made by the Minister. There has been a lot of discussion about business. The Committee should remember that the whole deregulation/better regulation thing came about as a result of initiatives taken by business in dialogue with the political system. I suspect that that dialogue was of the kind that says, ““If we go on like this and impose all these costs, we shall become globally uncompetitive””. That is certainly what happens in Brussels and is the kick-start for all this. A number of noble Lords have pointed out that there is a balance to be struck between the undoubted correctness of the approach being made by business and the interests of an awful lot of other people—and in those of course I include consumers and the way in which local authorities operate on their behalf. In that connection, I should mention that the second priority out of the six in the Rogers report is alcohol. I wonder whether the regulation of alcohol can ever be expected to be wholly consistent in every part of the country. When the Minister prays in aid the aim of consistency, has exactly what that means really been thought through? In that regard, the Committee is moving along with very little evidence. There are not too many hard examples of things where you can say, ““Yes of course, if the regime were to be changed, that would go better””, in the documents I have read. On the matter of precedence, I shall certainly have a close look at the Food Standards Agency direction. I would be interested to see whether it has ever been used or looks likely to be. Lastly, on the question of the frequency of use of a power to direct, of course that is something the Committee would be right to take into account. How often it is used is important. But one of the problems here is that there is no central database about directions. As far as I can see, it is extremely difficult to find out when directions have been used and what they were used for. As always I have had good assistance from the Library, but the librarians are finding that information difficult to track down. We have had again today all the assurances about safeguards, about the stop-gap and a reserve power, and how there is no intention to use it except when it is really necessary, but again the evidence for whether that has happened to date and whether it will continue to happen in the future is quite scanty. Having said that, I am grateful for the response, but I shall read Hansard carefully and might wish to come back to this matter at a later stage.