Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

The merits of the primary authority scheme are that it will be in the public interest and in the interests of business, as we discussed on a number of occasions today and last week. If we want the system to be a success, the primary authority must be adequately resourced. There is no doubt that, if we came back to this discussion in two or three years’ time, we would find that some authorities, still called ““local authorities””, would have the tremendous burden of having to find resources to carry out their primary authority functions whereas others would not. The county of Hertfordshire happens to have a large number of company headquarters, and there are a number of other reasons why it should be the chosen business partner of many major companies which operate across several local authority boundaries. No doubt there are other such examples and other local authorities which would hardly ever be primary authorities for one reason or another. In two or three years’ time, we will see nothing other than a patchwork quilt involving a great variety of burdensome responsibilities and less burdensome responsibilities on local authorities. To enable the primary authority adequately to resource its new responsibilities as a primary authority and to enable it to continue to do its normal job in this field and others, there is a need for it to be able to charge as the Bill proposes. There is nothing terribly new or novel about local authorities being able to charge for the services they provide. In an earlier discussion, we talked about authorities being nominated to be primary authorities, either by way of agreement or, contrary to the views of some in this Committee, possibly through nomination by the LBRO because the business has not been able to find a local authority partner. If there is no ability to charge, as provided for under Clause 29, then many local authorities will be much less willing to take on the responsibilities which we—if we agree with the main principle of this part of the Bill—want for all sorts of perfectly good reasons. Worse still, it may be that a local authority would take on the role and then not fulfil the requirements of the job as well as it should. Primary authorities must be adequately resourced.