Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [HL]

My Lords, we are in great danger of underestimating the impact of the introduction of this wide system on the individual. We are in danger of being shanghaied by the business community. This is not going to be easy. For example, if you privately abstract water, regulations and forms have to be filled in, with penalties attached to the abstraction licence if you do not stick to its conditions. There are lots of people in similar situations, living under regulations as individuals, and those people are used to the idea that, if they infringe, they go in front of the magistrates. There are social consequences of these courts being replaced by officials—in whom there is not the slightest degree of trust at the moment—who can be both judge and jury. This is going to take years for people to accept. Civil penalties for traffic offences, for example, do not do the relationship between the individual citizen and the police any good at all. On the whole, we do not like cameras or their consequences. This debate is about a compliance deficit which none of us can quite find and whose size and diversity we do not understand. We have been given no detailed evidence about the compliance deficit. We are completely underestimating the social consequences of what is proposed.