My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for introducing this amendment. I will be brief, because it concerns accountability, which has already been much discussed; and, like the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, I have really only just found out the intentions of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, regarding the amendment—I was a little blindsided about the formal structure. The accountability debate, as we have progressed through this Bill, has shown more appetite to enhance Parliament’s oversight than to create other bodies. My personal view is well known, that ultimately I think more than Parliament will be needed, but if the route of just Parliament is followed, at least to start, then it is true that some of the functions—or challenges—listed in this amendment for the supervisory board could be pursued that way.
However, the other intention of this amendment is to find a way to prevent regulatory capture from within, which I understand. The mechanism to ensure that the supervisory board itself is not captured includes having public meetings and public documents—bringing in the sunshine, as the noble Lord said. This has some merit as a way to reflect the public interest that supervisors seemingly could not define and to democratise in some way—although I am not sure whether it has been correctly formulated yet. I also share the noble Lord’s concern that press releases, annual reports and even appearances before Select Committees do not give penetration beyond the regulators making assertions. That has to be so, because there is a mismatch between reports and assertions and then what we discover further down the track about what was actually going on at the same time as we received those assertions. We have obtained penetration only through reports such as the Gloucester review.
Some stronger powers would be needed to compel better information than is currently provided by regulators and made public. That will apply to all the ideas about
oversight that we have been probing. I am not sure that we have found a perfect solution or combination of solutions yet, and I suspect that we will need more than one stage to do that. However, having a mechanism to prevent regulatory capture and groupthink is necessary—never mind the revolving door between the regulators and industry and the representation of industries within the regulators’ structure. The obligation to consult the public about rules is predominantly served through responses from industry. One thing that we know about consultations is that, broadly, they run on the weighing of the responses. At least that is certainly the way when it comes to government. When you have the weight of responses from industry, the relatively few that go in from public interest bodies do not necessarily hold the weight that they should.
The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, has brought forward some issues that we have to recognise and address. We need to put them into the pot of the matters that we think about as we move forward on accountability. I maintain my view that we probably will not achieve what we want simply by saying “enhance Parliament”. We will find over time that we need something else as well.