Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

Briefly, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, has said. The principal economic regulators have duties placed on them somewhere in the Acts which set them up to have minimum standards. They also have a set of public interest objectives. I am worried that the Government are seeking, in this and other legislation, to interfere in the independence of some of these regulators. They have not submitted much evidence that things are wrong now. This falls outside the general presumption that we are trying to ease the burden of regulation. In fact, one could interpret this part of the Bill as adding to regulation, not subtracting from it. It does at least make it very much more complicated. I join my noble friend Lord Razzall in hoping that we may persuade the Government to take away this whole part of the Bill and look at it again, because doing so would not detract from the main purposes that they intend.