Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

I have a great deal of sympathy with the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Turner of Camden. Looking at Clauses 26 and 27, I find it very difficult to understand—this may be my fault—how they would work. There seem to me to be too many players. You could call the system the price that you pay for consistency; the price could be too high. If someone is in breach of a statute that is the responsibility of a regulator and the local authority has to take some action, the local authority is taking action against one person. That is quite simple. Another local authority may have to take action against another person, and those two persons may be related; but under this statutory system, you have LACORS, the primary authority and 32 pubs, let us assume, set up in 32 different authorities. It may be deemed that 16 of the pubs are in breach of something and the other 16 are not. The managers may be looking for their Christmas bonus and arguing whether they are in breach of the regulations. The whole system can be intervened on by the LBRO at some point. You have to take Schedule 4, to which we are coming, to understand the two clauses. I start to think about alcohol disorder zones, on which some secondary legislation is going through at present. The whole thing is so complicated that the chances of people getting their mind around it and achieving consistency without paying far too high a price are very low.