My Lords, Clause 1 enables regulations to be made—as we have heard, they are never overturned—to require a specific regulator to put in place a procedure for assessing whether to treat overseas qualifications as if they were UK ones. However, we still do not know how many of the 60 actually lack such a power. The Minister wants this Bill; he says that it is necessary. Could he please list those regulators which, if circumstances required extra skilled professionals, could find that their statutes were insufficient and thus that they would need to be mandated, by law, to introduce a new process? Because, frankly, if there are no regulators that need this power, we do not need a law to give it to them.
If the regulator wanted to introduce such a process, and had the statute, why would it have to be mandated to do it? If the regulator does not want to introduce such a process, how autonomous is a regulator if it can then be told by a Government that it must do so with the force of law? It may, as the Minister has said, be just a process that they have to introduce, but we are, nevertheless, talking about the Government mandating a regulator to do something that it does not want to do—because if it does want to do it, it will just do it.
So the Minister needs to list the regulators who do not already have the power to adopt such a process. I understand that there may well be some, but it would be nice to know which ones they are. If the regulator has such a power, but does not want to introduce a process to assess whether somebody’s qualifications should be agreed, how does he justify mandating the regulator by law to do that?