Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

I rise to support these amendments. We think that the schemes established in the Bill will create an uncomfortable legal position. Rather like the image described by my noble friend Lord Cope of Berkeley when he spoke in an earlier Committee of sitting of a patchwork high street with every shop having a different primary authority, so, as my noble friend Lord Goodlad tells us, the Bill’s outcome will be a patchwork of statutory instruments made by Ministers to empower some regulators to impose sanctions in relation to some offences. That sounds pretty confusing. The Bill will create a situation in which Ministers may at a later time suspend a regulator’s power to impose sanctions by issuing directions. They may then revoke that suspension by further directions. The Bill needs to set out clearly which institutions, courts or regulators may exercise sanctioning powers in relation to criminal offences, and which may not. Given the views of the Select Committee on the Constitution, we fear that the arrangements in the Bill are at risk of being too complex and inaccessible to conform to one of the most basic requirements of the rule of law; that is, that all laws should be reasonably certain and accessible. I look forward to the Minister’s response.