My Lords, in moving Amendment 45 I will speak also to Amendment 46 in my name. I shall also speak to Amendments 63 and 68 in this group, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, to which I have added my name.
Amendments 45 and 46 both deal with the position of regulators that oversee the regulation of a regulated profession but do not carry out that regulation themselves. This typically arises where a regulator oversees a number of professional bodies, each of which provides qualifications for, and regulate those who practise, the profession. An example of this is the Financial Reporting Council, which oversees regulated auditors, but wholly or partly through the work done by several professional accountancy bodies. Those professional bodies qualify and regulate the accountants within their membership, not all of whom are regulated auditors. I will not attempt a technical description of the medical and dental professions, but the General Medical Council and the General Dental Council sit over the top of various other bodies and medical colleges to which individuals belong, and I suspect that similar issues arise.
Clause 8 requires the regulator to publish information on requirements to practise. My Amendment 45 is intended to ensure that, if the information is displayed on another website, the regulator need not gather and load up that information on its own website but can signpost where to find it. For example, the FRC could signpost information on the websites of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the corresponding bodies in Ireland and Scotland, as well as the other bodies which have recognised audit qualifications. Anything else is just bureaucracy for the sake of it and is inefficient.
Clause 9 places a duty on a regulator to provide information to a regulator in another part of the UK. My Amendment 46 says that if someone else holds the information, they should seek to get the information provided by that other person. A regulator may have information about individuals in relation to the particular regulated profession but may not have information relating to the broader context of an individual’s membership of a professional body—for example, a full disciplinary or complaint record. Gathering information only for the purpose of sharing it with another UK regulator would again be duplicative and inefficient.
Since the amendments in this group were tabled, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and I have received an extraordinary letter from the Minister that is relevant to all the amendments in this group. This was one of my noble friend’s Sunday missives, which we have all learned to love during the passage of this Bill. Noble Lords may recall that I initially asked for a list of the bodies covered by the Bill. I received a letter, dated 23 March, listing 160 regulated professions. The Minister said at the time that this was a list of the regulated professions that BEIS considered fell within the Bill’s definition. Last Sunday’s letter claimed that the earlier list was “indicative”—although he did not say that at the time—and a new list was attached. The new list has over 250 professions and nearly 60 regulators.
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The letter clarified the position of statutory auditors, which I have been banging on about, and recognised that, while the FRC remains a regulator within the terms of the Bill, the bodies that actually regulate audit as recognised supervisory bodies—the chartered accounting bodies—are also now within the terms of the Bill. This does not alter the need for my Amendments 45 and 46.
Indeed, it strengthens the case, because asking the FRC to duplicate information held by the chartered bodies or handle information requests when the correct information is held by the chartered bodies would be unnecessary—and, as I said, I am sure that this issue is wider than just audit.
More broadly, this latest letter has shaken what little faith I had in BEIS in relation to the Bill. I have never really understood the rationale for the sweeping powers in this Bill and it has all the hallmarks of being a Bill conceived and executed by officials with little or no ministerial policy direction or oversight. My noble friend the Minister has been unable to justify the Bill other than in the most general terms, and last week we learned that one of the clauses was likely to apply to only four bodies. Now we learn that the Bill was drafted with a far-from-perfect understanding of the territory that it purports to cover. This is no way to legislate. The Government would be well advised to pause the Bill, once we complete Committee today, and to think long and hard about whether and to what extent it is appropriate to legislate in this Bill.
In the light of these latest developments it is absolutely clear that Amendments 63 and 68, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, are necessary in principle. The content is of course already out of date, and I note from the Minister’s letter that there is no claim that the latest list is definitive—because apparently it is still being tested. We will need a final list on the face of this Bill before it leaves your Lordships’ House, because it is simply unacceptable for legislation to be uncertain as to who or what is within its scope. I beg to move.