Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

I support the noble Viscount’s point. Our Amendment No. 152A, which is in this group, tests the same point as the noble Viscount is making. I shall also speak to Amendment No. 155, which raises a different point. I am sure that it is common ground on all sides of the Committee that we fully support the inclusion of stop notices in the Bill. The stop notice enables regulators to put an immediate halt to activity that is causing or is likely to cause harm to human health, the environment or the financial interests of consumers. It is also common ground on this side of the Committee that the test as drafted that regulators must prove before deploying a stop notice is set so high that, we fear, the sanction will not be used in circumstances where it would be justified. We can play around with the word ““serious””; we can all think of examples. For example, there are circumstances when a small number of people may be badly affected by a business activity. Does that qualify as serious? It is obviously serious to that small number of people. Alternatively, a large number of consumers might suffer minor detriment individually as a result of a business activity, but the financial windfall for the company is huge. Again, does that count as serious? With the help of the National Consumer Council, I think that I can do slightly better than the noble Viscount’s legislative precedent in relation to concern about the use of the word ““serious””. We can go back to the Legal Services Act 2007, where—on the advice of parliamentary counsel, I assume—the Government used arguments about ambiguity to resist amendments that used words such as ““significant”” and ““serious”” in the same context as they are now being used in the Bill. The conclusion was that such words are difficult to interpret and that it was likely that the court would be called on to decide what was meant by those terms. I very much look forward to the Government’s response on that point. I know that we have joined-up government, but do we have historical precedent-led government as well? The arguments that were used on one side of the coin on the Legal Services Act seem to be used on the other side here. Amendment No. 155 raises another serious point of principle. As the Bill is drafted, if a stop notice has been served on a business, perfectly correctly, and the business has then rectified the peril that it has been asked to rectify, the regulator has a maximum of 14 days before that business has to be enabled to restart its business activity. That seems to us to be far too long. The business may well have immediately stepped in to rectify the activity or omission at which the stop notice was aimed but is none the less out of business for 14 days. We think that 14 days is too long, which is why we have proposed seven days in Amendment No. 155.