My Lords, much of the discussion on health and safety has been around the issues of believed or real overregulation. I have already committed myself to the view that there is a great deal of overregulation which it is right to stop and that there is too much regulation which has caused real and proper anger. However, the Government have to be careful, when it comes to deregulation, not to fall into the same trap; in other words, for the deregulation efforts to look like an additional activity, as if to say, “Let us see how many things we can claim we have got rid of”. I must say, very delicately, that that is what this looks like.
Before my noble friend Lord Sharkey made his point, I was going to put it in the form of a question. I was going to ask what sanctions there are against a tribunal that decides that, irrespective of the fact that it does not have the power to do so, it is going to make a comment. I suspect that there are no such sanctions, which means that the tribunal can in fact say what it can say under this power that is being removed. It might
be argued, when the power was originally put forward three years ago, that it would have been sensible to have had some kind of recall procedure to make sure that when the recommendations had been made, someone would listen to them. That might have been argued, but it was not.
It seems that we have here a power that is merely a statement of what is a power in any case. It is not onerous. So we are spending time removing a power that exists, whether you have it or not. Even so, it has a purpose, which is that tribunals ought to think through not just the case in front of them, but how the case fits into a pattern of behaviour or a way in which a particular company appears to approach certain things. It does not do any harm to say to the company, “Look, you’re guilty in this case but don’t you think it would be more sensible if you had somebody in charge of this, or if you recognised that in that particular factory in that particular place this was likely to occur?”. You can imagine the sorts of points that might reasonably be made by a reasonable tribunal.
If I may say so, this is so unimportant a change that if it is pushed to a Division, I shall be happy to support the Government on the basis that it does not mean anything. But I ought to say to the Government that it is not sensible to bring forward this proposal in these circumstances merely to add one to the number of deregulation activities that have taken place. I say that to my noble friend because I believe in deregulation and want to get rid of a whole lot of stuff that is not necessary and is telling people how to lead their lives, which they can do perfectly well themselves. But let us not bring that into disrepute by having the kind of discussion that we are, unnecessarily, having today and which I have, no doubt unnecessarily, prolonged.
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