My Lords, while I absolutely agree with my noble friend Lord Foulkes that any advice would be better if it was comprehensive and included all the things that everyone would want to know if they were applying either to move here or to go away, the more fundamental question, which I and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, asked, is whether we need Clause 7 at all. As she and others have said, it is not clear why it is necessary to establish a statutory advice centre simply to handle information and provide advice and assistance. It will not make any decisions. It will not have the authority to chide regulators for not doing something; it does not have any authority over them. The statutory requirement is actually on regulators to provide advice to the centre—there is no statutory requirement on the centre to fine them if they do not do it or anything else like that—although, as has been said, there are already other ways of getting that information. In addition, only the UK Government, not the other Governments in the Bill, interestingly enough, are able to enforce this requirement.
I do not know whether that is an oversight but, given that there is more than one national authority in the Bill, it would be interesting to know why the requirement on regulators is laid down only by the UK Government.
This is all very strange. It is a very clunky and convoluted way of simply asking statutory regulators to tell a Minister such information as is needed to provide advice to potential applicants on how they go about getting their qualifications recognised here. They have been doing that for years. We heard earlier about a number of regulators, particularly in the health service, veterinary science and other areas, that have been doing this for years without any statutory requirement to provide the advice, so it is unclear why the new law is needed. As has already been said, we know that the assistance centre is already in operation. But I think none of us knows why we need a specific underpinning now, and what it is that could not be done by a couple of civil servants within BEIS.
The Minister said last Wednesday that “new legislative cover” is required, but he did not spell out what it was required to do—why this could not be done on a voluntary basis. We have lots of other advice centres which do not have to have statutory underpinning, so why is legislation needed? He said, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, just quoted, that the centre
“is basically a focal point—a signposting mechanism that tells people where to go to get more information about professions”
and that
“it employs either two or three people.”
It must be tiny; I was going to say that it received 1,600 queries in a year, but it has now received 1,601—I think our little website here gets far more hits than that. As the Minister had the honesty to confess:
“These queries can be as simple as saying, ‘What is the address of the place I have to write to, to find out how I become a nurse in Great Britain?’”—[Official Report, 9/6/21; col. 1501.]
If you google “nurse vacancies”, you might just find it. The idea that we are employing anybody and paying them money to tell people about the address they need to write to to find out how to become a nurse in Great Britain makes me worried, and why on earth does it have to be a statutory body if it is just signposting?
The impact assessment says that
“the Secretary of State can (through contractual arrangements) require the national assistance centre to support professionals”—
it is unclear what “support” means—
“in getting their UK qualifications recognised overseas by providing reasonable information to their overseas counterparts.”
Again, surely the regulator can do that. If a doctor wants to apply to be a doctor in New Zealand, for example, surely their regulator can supply that information. If it is to be done by the advice centre and by contract, it is really hard to think why, again, it needs two bodies or persons to be statutory if they are simply setting up contracts to be able to exchange information—because it is not a decision-making body.
It is unclear what the relationship will be between the centre and overseas regulators. If it is by contracts, how much will they be bound by data protection to ensure that the overseas regulators will look after people’s data according to normal laws? That is easier in a regulator-to-regulator agreement—we have talked about these elsewhere, so why not here?
I am completely mystified as to why Clause 7 is in the Bill. Perhaps we can just take it out, and then we can all go home.