Legislative and Regulatory Reform (Regulatory Functions) (Amendment) Order 2009

My Lords, I thank the Minister for explaining the order. Reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens on both the public and private sectors is a worthwhile aim, strongly supported on this side of the House. To that extent, the order is welcome. However, in the Making It Simple annual review 2008, the noble Lord, Lord Carter, stated that the Government were on target to reduce the overall burden of regulation by 25 per cent. The Minister himself just referred to this. How does he square that figure with the most recent burdens barometer produced by the British Chambers of Commerce, which found that the total cost of regulation to business since 1998 had risen to £76.8 billion? Indeed, this is an increase of £10.8 billion from last year. The Better Regulation Task Force established five principles of good regulation, to which the Minister referred. Those principles were designed to be a useful toolkit for assessing and improving the quality of regulation. The principles, as the noble Lord said, are proportionality, accountability, consistency, transparency and targeting. I make the following observation about the order, because it is drafted—as many orders are—simply as a series of amendments to extant legislation and, when read on its own, is completely incomprehensible. The first things that it comes to—after the wherefores and whereases—are amendments to the 2007 order, but you need to get hold of the 2007 order to know what it is all about. Even then, the lay man would be hard pushed to make head or tail of it. Does that not breach the transparency test? The Explanatory Memorandum is indeed helpful, but that is not quite the same thing. I ask the Minister how those who are in business, who are often untrained and inexperienced in reading and interpreting orders and legislation generally, would know whether it applied to them and in what way. Turning briefly to the impact assessment, can the Minister tell me whether the figure of £2.8 million for one-off costs is per regulator or across the whole country? As to the range of total benefits, which is stated as being from £2 million to £45.2 million, I observe that under any interpretation of the word "materiality" this is sufficiently wide to cause some scepticism. What does it mean and why is it so wide? Returning to the order, I note that it is stated that the traffic commissioners have been assured that the code and principles do not apply to their functions of conducting civil or criminal proceedings. It would be helpful to have on the record the reason for this exclusion.