My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling this probing amendment. To answer his question I will explain the purpose of the clause. The Government have significantly improved the regulatory environment for business, as I have already explained. There has also been some encouraging progress at an EU level. This December’s EU Competitiveness Council conclusions on better regulation were extremely positive, calling for the first time for EU burden reduction targets. Therefore, the issue now goes wider than the UK. Building on those achievements, the Government are legislating to lay the framework for transparent regulatory reporting.
On Amendment 33P, I acknowledge that the framing of the business impact target sets a wide scope for future Administrations to determine for themselves what will count for the purposes of the target; that is, what is a “qualifying regulatory provision”. We consider it prudent to allow sufficient flexibility for future Administrations to determine the precise scope of the target, depending on their priorities and circumstances. We believe that this approach should attract support on all sides, not least at this stage of the Parliament.
Potentially a wide range of regulations could be in scope, meaning that some adjustment may be necessary to avoid perverse outcomes or other adverse impacts. For example, it may not be sensible to include certain measures—such as those related to national security or civil emergencies—within the target, because they could not be anticipated at the start of, say, the five-year parliamentary term. In addition, a future Government may wish to exclude measures that have negligible impacts on business, such as simple consolidations of existing regulations. Including all such measures in the target could be disproportionate and would represent a poor use of taxpayers’ resources without delivering obvious benefits to business.
The fundamental point is that the choices that a future Administration make regarding the scope of a business impact target will be transparent and will be for the Government of the day to defend. It is not appropriate for this Government or for Parliament unduly to restrict that choice. I hope that that is not byzantine but sensible and that on reflection noble Lords will feel that it is a reasonable rationale.
My noble friend raised the important issue of methodology and I agree with him that you can have as many methods as you have economics professors. However, it is an important principle that we need transparency around methodology and, of course, methodology is an important component of the good work that a body such as the RPC does. It is entirely appropriate that the Government of the day are able to look at the methodology options in a transparent way, to make appropriate decisions and to put them before Parliament. I hope that the noble Lord will be willing to withdraw his amendment.