Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 42B: 42B: Clause 12, page 6, line 16, leave out ““to which this section applies”” The noble Lord said: This clause is concerned with the relationship between the LBRO and other regulators. Amendments No. 42B is a probing amendment to discern the reason why the hands have been laid on five regulators and not on the rest, while Amendment No. 43 would in effect require the LBRO to create a memorandum of understanding with any regulator with whom it had to work as opposed to stipulating these five. Paragraph 39 on page 9 of the Explanatory Notes for this clause states: "““It is deemed particularly important that LBRO enter into memoranda of understanding with these five regulators as they all have functions that overlap with those of LBRO””." To be sure, but there are plenty of other important regulators which I suspect will have a far greater need to collaborate with the LBRO. Let me give a couple of examples. The first is the Charity Commission, which appears in Schedule 5. Going back to enforcement priorities, paragraph 36 on page 8 of the Explanatory Notes lists one of them as, "““(iii) trade description, trade marking and doorstep selling””." The Charities Act, which we passed quite recently, has a whole part devoted to the issue of doorstep and street selling, which is an extremely prevalent and important way for charities to raise money. We have 180,000 charities in this country in every parish, town, village and city, and yet they will have no particular link with the LBRO. They are perceived to be much less important than the five listed in Clause 12(2). A second example is the Highways Agency. I can see that it would have a substantial overlap with the Better Regulation Commission. It is not even in Schedule 5, nor in Amendment No. 111 of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, which would add names to Schedule 5. To suggest that the Gambling Commission is more important to the operation of the LBRO than the Charity Commission or the Highways Agency seems extraordinary. Worse, if the LBRO is to do a great deal of business with the OFT, it confirms my worst fears that it will operate at a hugely high level—it will be, as somebody said in our debates on Monday, an NBRO. To be effective, the LBRO must follow Keynes’s words and crawl across the frontiers of human knowledge with a hand lens, not operate at 10,000 feet in a plane marked ““OFT””. We must ensure that this new operation is really focused on the detail; that is how we will get the right regulatory balance. The way this clause has been drawn suggests far too high a level, and far too far-reaching and broad a remit: a remit which properly belongs to a national organisation, not a Local Better Regulation Office. I would therefore like to hear from the Minister why these bodies have been picked out, and why we are not looking at some of the other regulators who will have day-to-day contact with the communities in which the LBRO should be operating. I am not against memoranda of understanding; they are good to have. But I do not see why they should be confined to these five—some of which seem to have peripheral, if any, day-to-day contact with the LBRO—if the LBRO is to function as I perceive it should, and as I think the Minister does too from the way he has explained it as a co-ordinating, even-handed approach across the country. I beg to move.