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Today's House of Lords debates - Monday

07 July 2014

Version: Uncorrected | Updated 23:13

Deregulation Bill

Second Reading

3.14 pm

Moved by

Lord Wallace of Saltaire

That the Bill be read a second time.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD):

My Lords, this Bill contains important, sensible and proportionate measures to improve the

regulatory regime in the UK in a wide range of areas. It is not a radical, wholesale overhaul

of regulation. The coalition Government are not, of course, opposed to regulation. This

Government believe in and will protect the sensible and necessary regulations that ensure that

the safeguards are in place to protect people and the environment as well as to promote

competition and economic growth.

However, if it is to protect the interests of consumers and the safety of the public effectively,

regulation must be sensible and proportionate. In many areas in recent years, we have seen

regulatory burdens grow out of all proportion, surpassing what is necessary and costing

businesses and public services additional millions of pounds. The Government’s aim when

coming into office was to reduce the administrative burden on business created by regulation,

and to encourage enterprise, innovation and, most importantly, the creation of new jobs,

which give this country long-term economic security.

In April 2011, the Prime Minister announced that this Government should be the first in

modern history to leave office having reduced the overall burden of regulation rather than

increased it. The one-in, one-out policy, and later the one-in, two-out policy were introduced

as one of the major components of the Government’s strategy to achieve this aim, ensuring

that the flow of new regulations is necessary, effective, justified and proportionate, in order to

minimise unnecessary burdens on business.

The Red Tape Challenge was introduced in April 2011 to give business and the general

public the opportunity to challenge the Government to get rid of unnecessarily burdensome

regulations. More than 30,000 comments were crowdsourced online from individuals and

businesses, harnessing the knowledge of those people faced with understanding and

complying with these regulations. In the light of this public feedback, departmental policy

leads presented a package of deregulatory proposals, which were then reviewed and

challenged by Red Tape Challenge Ministers.

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The intention was to reverse the default setting by asking departments to consider the

legislation they are responsible for in a fundamentally different way. The starting point has

been that regulation should be delivered in a non-regulatory way, unless there is good

justification for the Government being involved. The Red Tape Challenge sought wide-

ranging comment on a large number of regulations, from health and safety and environmental

regulations, to housing and construction and insolvency law. The final report will be

published towards the end of the Parliament, setting out the achievements made by the Red

Tape Challenge and the one-in, two-out programmes in reducing the overall burden of

regulation on business in this Parliament.

Looking to the future, legislation for new statutory deregulation targets was announced in the

Queen’s Speech. This will require a target to be published for the removal of regulatory

burdens in each parliamentary term, and for government to report transparently against that

target. During the course of this Parliament, the Government have also invested a large

amount of time in looking at how the agencies undertake the enforcement of these

regulations, to ensure that they are measured and proportionate and not applied arbitrarily

without thought to the impact on business.

The Deregulation Bill is thus a small but important part of the Government’s ongoing process

of reducing the number of unjustifiable regulations. Much of what the Red Tape Challenge

has done has been achieved by alterations to secondary legislation and administrative

changes. However, during the course of the Red Tape Challenge process, many reforms were

found that required primary legislation to fulfil. This Bill will create around £400 million in

savings over 10 years and declutter the statute book of obsolete or confusing legislation.

Those who have read all the way through to Schedule 20 will know that a number of 19th

century statutes are repealed.

The Government believe that it is good housekeeping to review and tidy the statute book to

make it easier for the users of the law. Several pieces of legislation were identified through

the Red Tape Challenge as being no longer of practical use. The Government are using the

opportunity of the Deregulation Bill to repeal those obsolete laws. This is in addition to the

excellent work done by the Law Commission through its statutory law of repeal process,

which principally focuses on repealing primary obsolete legislation.

The Bill was first published in draft and underwent pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint

Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, which reported in December 2013. I

look forward to his contribution to this debate, as well as those of three other members of that

committee: the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and the noble Lords, Lord Sharkey and Lord

Naseby. The Joint Committee welcomed the concept of the Bill, saying it hoped that there

would be more of the same sort in the future. The Joint Committee also suggested that the

Bill could benefit from the addition of some more substantial items when it was introduced.

The Government accepted the primary recommendations of the Joint Committee and have

added 30 new clauses to the Bill. The Bill was introduced to the other place in January of this

year as a carryover Bill. It underwent extensive consideration in Committee and two days of

debates on Report before being passed to this House.

Some of the key measures in the Bill are as follows. Clause 1 exempts self-employed people

from Section 3(2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, except those who are on a

list of high-hazard industries or activities, which will be set out in regulation. The proposed

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change emanates from a recommendation made by Professor Löfstedt in his review of health

and safety and will exempt around 2 million self-employed people from the health and safety

legislation that is unnecessary for the work activities they are undertaking.

Clause 2 removes the power from employment tribunals to make wider recommendations to

employers in discrimination cases. These have been identified by businesses as a burden and

are often surplus to requirements because businesses, keen to avoid further tribunals, often

undertake the necessary actions without any such recommendations needing to be made.

Clauses 3 to 5 implement some of the key recommendations of the Richard review,

simplifying what apprenticeships are and the process by which they are developed and

awarded, and providing the legislative basis for a new payment system to route funding

directly to employers so that they are more responsive to their needs.

Clauses 21 to 26 implement the recommendations of the independent stakeholder working

group on unrecorded rights of way that require primary legislation. They are part of a

carefully balanced package of reforms that is supported by the full range of interests on rights

of way, from the Ramblers to the Country Land and Business Association. Some noble Lords

may have seen the useful briefing from the Ramblers that reached my inbox this morning. It

is a remarkable consensus around the particularly emotive and contentious but important

issue of public rights of way.

The reforms will make the procedures for recording or changing rights of way more

streamlined and flexible but will also give local authorities more scope to use their judgment

in dealing with insubstantial or irrelevant applications and objections, and enable the

development of locally negotiated solutions. They will help towards completion of the

definitive map and statement by the cut-off date, in current legislation, of 2026. There are

also provisions to enable the right to apply for an extinguishment or diversion to be extended

to all landowners, while enabling any public funding expended in that process to be

recovered in full where an application is solely in the landowner’s interest. The provisions fit

broadly with the Government’s aim of reducing regulation, of smaller government and of

giving more power to local authorities and local people to resolve disputes.

Clauses 29 to 34 relate to housing and development matters. These include: reinstating the

original qualifying period of three years for right to buy; relaxing restrictions on Londoners to

rent out their homes for less than three months at a time; introducing a regime of optional

building requirements for local authorities to support the Government’s housing standards

review; and a clause addressing an unexpected judgment related to tenancy deposits.

Clauses 35 to 40 remove some of the outdated burdens relating to transport legislation,

bringing legislation into line with practice; for example, removing the requirement on local

authorities to seek permission from the Secretary of State to establish, alter or remove zebra

crossings. This section also includes measures limiting the use of CCTV when issuing

parking fines by post and removes the automatic reopening of formal investigations of marine

accidents when new evidence, however trivial, comes to light.

Clause 43 removes the criminal sanctions which currently apply when householders make

mistakes presenting waste for collection. A civil penalty regime will exist instead when a

householder fails to comply with requirements and this causes harm to the local amenity. The

Government believe this to be a more proportionate course of action.

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Clauses 45 to 48 change the nature of child trust funds to bring them into line with the

arrangements of the much more widely used junior ISAs.

Clauses 52 to 59 make reasonable and rational alterations to the regulations around alcohol

and entertainment which have been discussed on a number of occasions in this Chamber

since I became a Member. These include sensible changes such as removing the requirement

on community film clubs to obtain a licence to exhibit films, while maintaining all the

regulations related to age-related restrictions; and creating a new light-touch form of

authorisation under the Licensing Act 2003 for community groups and certain businesses to

sell small amounts of alcohol. This section also commits the Government to undertake a

review of the alternatives to criminal sanctions for non-payment of TV licences.

Clauses 79 to 81 make some changes to legislation to make it easier for users of law. These

are the power to spell out dates in legislation, enacting part of the Government’s good law

initiative by creating a power to combine different forms of subordinate legislation, and a

power to use ambulatory references for international shipping instruments.

Clauses 83 to 86 create a statutory duty for non-economic regulators to consider economic

growth when carrying out their functions. This duty will be supplementary to, and will not

supplant, the regulators’ other statutory obligations. It will make them take economic growth

into account as they exercise their regulatory functions. Guidance on this has just been

published. I hope that a copy has reached the Opposition Front Bench. There is a copy

available in the Library.

The wide-ranging nature of the Bill should emphasise the Government’s comprehensive

consideration of all areas of regulation to ensure that regulation is proportionate and

necessary. Most of the measures are relatively technical and not politically contentious. No

doubt we shall be told in the course of Second Reading that some are considered contentious.

As such, this is an important step towards relieving businesses, individuals and public sector

organisations of unnecessary administrative burdens, freeing them up to pursue economic

growth for Britain without excessive regulation. The Government look forward to the

detailed and expert scrutiny that this House can offer. I beg to move that the Bill be read a

second time.

3.28 pm

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab):

I thank the Minister for introducing the Deregulation Bill today and look forward to the many

speeches to come. With more than 30 noble Lords listed to speak, I am sure that every clause

and schedule will get some attention as we start what I suspect will be a long job, stretching

out, perhaps, until the end of the year. We intend to scrutinise very carefully this rather mixed

bag that the Government have put before us. I am joined on the Front Bench for the majority

of the Bill by my noble friends Lady Hayter and Lord Tunnicliffe, but others will have to

come in with their expertise on areas of the Bill.

I join the Minister in thanking noble Lords who served on the Joint Committee on pre-

legislative scrutiny of the Bill, particularly its chair, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and my

noble friend Lady Andrews. It has clearly improved considerably since its first publication.

Indeed, we will hear reference in the debate to how much change there has been, since, as the

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Minister said, some 30 new clauses have been added since the Bill left the Commons. That

suggests that, in some senses, the pre-legislative scrutiny could only have partial effect, sadly,

since a lot of the Bill, almost 30%, has emerged since it finished its work.

Although the name of the Bill is the Deregulation Bill, it contains a number of measures

which would properly be regarded as re-regulation. It might be helpful at some point if the

Minister could explain precisely, perhaps by means of a chart—he is good at these things—

what is deregulatory, what is re-regulatory and what is simply shifting burdens around the

various places that have to undertake them. That would be helpful to us as we progress

through the Bill.

I am sure that your Lordships’ House enjoyed the Minister’s attempt at making this Bill

sound central to future economic growth. However, I hope that it will not come as too much

of a surprise to him if I tell him that deregulating the sale of knitting yarns, freeing our

children to buy their own chocolate liqueurs, decriminalising household waste and abolishing

dog collars are not measures that are going to generate jobs or deliver prosperity. If your

Lordships will forgive me for saying it, some of the clauses and schedules are barking mad.

People up and down the country are being hit by the cost of living crisis as their wages do not

rise at the same rate as prices, yet instead of measures to stimulate the economy, the

Government give us this Christmas tree Bill to end all Christmas tree Bills—forgetting, of

course, that one of the few things that are not dealt with in it are Christmas trees.

All Governments have a duty to reduce unnecessary regulation at every opportunity, but

unfortunately this Government’s approach to regulation is simplistic. Smart regulation

underpins fair markets and can level the playing field for small firms and new entrants—the

very people and businesses that create new jobs and prosperity. Smart regulation saves lives.

For example, it is a matter of great pride for all of us that the 2012 Olympic infrastructure

was built without the loss of one life. Regulation played a part in that. The men and women

working on those construction sites knew the value of having clear health and safety

regulations in place.

Smart regulation can help to drive innovation and growth. Yes, regulation is a concern for

some businesses, but most sensible business people understand that rules are needed to

protect people’s safety and rights, promote competition and prevent employers being

undercut by those who do not play by the rules. As the Federation of Small Businesses has

noted, the concerns of business are often more about how regulations are developed and

introduced, how they are enforced, and the existence of duplication and overlapping rules that

waste their time.

When in power, Labour sought to reduce regulation by introducing the Better Regulation

Commission and an ongoing better regulation programme, and made a number of legislative

changes to reduce the cost of regulation. Our programmes for simplifying regulation

delivered £3 billion of savings to business per year. In contrast, the impact statement for the

draft Bill estimated that it would save businesses and civil society a mere £10 million over 10

years, although the Minister has said that the figure is now £400 million over 10 years.

Perhaps he could outline where the additional savings have come from. These figures

underline that, while we all agree that unnecessary regulation can be a burden on business, a

sensible approach to deregulation is about more than repealing one or two minor statutes.

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By my count, the 86 clauses in, and 20 schedules to, the Bill cover at least 12 major

Whitehall departments, and some measures apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

There are some proposals in this rag-tag hotchpotch of a Bill that are welcome and that we do

not oppose. However, there are some rather disturbing proposals hidden beneath the knitting

yarn and the piles of redundant dog collars which we will vigorously oppose.

There are fresh attacks on employment rights, with the removal of yet more powers from

employment tribunals. Those are measures that the Government’s own impact assessment

claims will have a negligible effect on businesses or may even cost them money. We will not

support any new attacks on hard-working people.

I turn to the first part of the Bill. Exempting self-employed people in certain industries from

health and safety regulations will simply create confusion about who is covered and who is

not. The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health is opposed to that, calling it,

“a very short-sighted and misleading move, it won’t actually help anyone; it won’t support

business; but it will cause general confusion”.

Even the Federation of Small Businesses, which supports the change in principle, says that

there is a question mark over how effective this clause will be, as it crucially depends on how

well drafted and extensive the “prescribed description” list is. We understand that the HSE

will consult on this later this year, but I put it to the Minister that it will be impossible to

proceed to scrutinise this clause if we do not know precisely what the prescribed list contains.

The draft that we have seen raises more questions than it solves. I hope the Minister will

ensure that we have a complete list by the time we get to the Committee stage.

As the Minister mentioned, the Bill will also remove employment tribunals’ power to make

wider recommendations to employers who have been judged to have discriminated against

someone unlawfully. Such recommendations are only advisory, but they promote good

working practice. Why are the Government trying to limit the ability of tribunals to make

observations which might help to drive up standards? What are they afraid of? The House of

Commons Library considered the impact assessment for that measure and found that, despite

the Minister labelling it deregulatory and counting it as an “out” under the Government’s

arbitrary one-in, two-out system, business will incur a cost as a result of the removal of the

power. What sort of Government proudly propose a deregulatory measure that actually costs

businesses money?

Building on Labour’s progress in government, the Bill seeks to introduce a growth duty on

regulators, as the Minister explained. This duty will compel them to “have regard” to the

promotion of economic growth when carrying out their functions and to carry them out in a

necessary and proportionate way. We support the aims behind this duty and clearly the

additional principle that regulators should go about their business in a proportionate way. I

received a letter from the noble Lord this morning together with some draft guidance. I thank

him for that. But I have not had time to absorb it or check whether it covers our concern that

the duty does not inhibit or contradict the primary function of any regulator, particularly

those dealing with social issues and the EHRC.

We have concerns about other parts of the Bill. Housing is a critical part of the cost of living

crisis for families up and down the country, so should there not be a coherent, long-term

approach, rather than ad hoc tinkering? The number of homes built for social rent has fallen

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to just over 7,700, the lowest in 20 years—indeed, since records began—and a fall of 75%

from 2009-10. At the same time, the Government have pledged to replace housing sold under

the right to buy, but there is mounting evidence that they are failing to ensure that this

actually happens. In light of this, why do the Government refuse to undertake a review of the

effectiveness of the current right-to-buy system and the impact that their right-to-buy policy

is having on the supply of affordable housing? What is the rationale for the change in

planning requirements for offering short-term lets in London, which may have fire and

personal safety implications?

The decriminalisation of waste will apparently reduce the regulatory burden on households,

but it may increase the burden on local authorities, and particularly affect their ability to

reach their recycling targets. We have been told, in a helpful note by the councils, that

operating standard collection arrangements is crucial to helping councils and residents further

increase recycling levels to meet EU targets. Why remove that power? The Deregulation Bill

also removes the offence, punishable by a £1,000 fine, of not complying with prescribed

arrangements for refuse collection and converts this to a £60 civil penalty. The current

arrangements are used proportionately and principally as a deterrent by councils. The

proposed civil fine will not serve as an effective deterrent and will undermine the work of

councils to encourage and support residents to increase recycling rates. The new trigger for a

penalty is that the resident’s behaviour is,

“detrimental to any amenities of the locality”.

That is a novel test, with no legal precedents to define it. It almost certainly would not allow a

council to enforce, for example, recycling arrangements which may be needed to get best

value for money from a waste collection contract.

Speaking of fines, we will want to discuss in some detail the thinking behind the

Government’s proposals to decriminalise failure to pay the licence fee collected by the BBC.

We agree that it makes sense to consider this issue in the round, but we want to be assured

that the terms of reference for the review will be debated in both Houses of Parliament and

that the results of the review will feed into the charter and licence fee discussions and not be

separated from that process.

We will look closely at the measures in the Bill to deregulate taxis and public hire

vehicles outside London. The Government’s proposed reforms to the taxi and minicab

trade will enable people without a minicab licence to drive one when it is “off duty”, end

annual checks on drivers’ licences, and allow minicab operators to subcontract

bookings to other firms in other areas. There has been widespread criticism of the

Government’s last-minute decision to insert these reforms into the Deregulation Bill.

Campaigners, industry bodies and unions are also warning that these changes will have

severe safety implications, as local councils do not have the powers to enforce the

changes safely.

The Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which campaigns for better personal safety, has raised

concerns that enabling anyone to drive a licensed minicab will provide,

“greater opportunity for those intent on preying on women”.

The Local Government Association has said that,

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“it is imperative that the Government withdraws these plans”

to ensure passenger safety. All this when we have now received the major review that

the Law Commission has been carrying out since 2011 on taxi and private hire

deregulation. The law as it stands—both in London and Plymouth with its bespoke

legislation, and in the rest of England and Wales with its different legal framework—is

built on the premise of broadly local trade in local areas and allows each local authority

to regulate the taxi and private hire trade in its own area. Crucially, it gives local

enforcement officers sufficient powers to enforce the existing law over the drivers,

vehicles and operators in each respective area.

The report of the Law Commission, which specifically considered deregulatory

measures, would set up new trading conditions, freeing private hire operators and

drivers to work in a national environment, and for both taxis and the private hire

industry to compete on a pricing basis that the public would understand. However, it

also proposed making sufficient changes to the enforcement regime such that local

authority enforcement officers, in particular, specially trained stopping officers, would

have new powers to enforce the proposed legislation over vehicles, drivers or operators,

regardless of whether they were registered in their licensing authority area or had come

from outside.

We have a strange situation. The Bill’s proposals, which were introduced without

proper consultation, will have to be repealed when DfT brings forward, as it intends to

do, the Law Commission proposals. That begins to look more like a response to special

pleading than a genuine attempt to deregulate. I thought that this was a deregulatory

Bill, not a double regulation Bill.

The Bill contains a controversial blanket ban on the use of CCTV for parking offences,

something that the LGA, the British Parking Association, cycling groups, head teachers and

charities representing blind and disabled people have argued against, while businesses and

motoring groups offered mixed responses, with some motoring groups calling the ban a

retrograde step and some businesses stressing that CCTV could remain beneficial at

particular times and on particular occasions.

We will be supporting the proposals in the Bill for public footpaths. The present system for

recording public paths on definitive maps is not operating with the speed and efficiency

needed to ensure that all the rights of way are properly recorded, which would give certainty

to all.

Finally, as we are out walking, I come back to dogs. Noble Lords will be aware of the old

filmmaking saw, which said that you should aim never to work with children or animals. I

wonder whether that holds true for legislation too. I have a strong feeling that this part is

going to cause an awful lot of trouble. At the moment, dogs must always be sold with a collar

and tag. The Government announced in February 2013 that they were going to introduce

micro-chipping for all dogs in April 2016. The provision in the Bill, however, will create an

18-month gap between when the Bill is passed and when those rules come in. The LGA

opposes the clause on animal welfare grounds. If a dog becomes lost at present, anyone who

finds it is able to read the information on its collar. Members of the public will not be able to

read a microchip and determine where an animal belongs. That will make it harder for

members of the public to contact owners when they come across a stray dog and increase the

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likelihood that people will deliver stray dogs to councils. That would constitute a new burden

and would surely need to be fully funded. Is that another spending commitment in a time of

austerity? That is yet another nonsensical policy in this rather disjointed Bill. The

Government seem to have been caught out on an unworkable proposal permitting dogs to be

sold without collars before their own compulsory micro-chipping requirements have been

introduced.

Good regulation protects consumers’ and employees’ rights, ensures that our industries play

their part in moving to a green and sustainable future, keeps citizens safe and saves lives. It is

important that it is effective and enforceable. Challenges arise when ill-thought through

regulation has unforeseen consequences or is interpreted bureaucratically and inflexibly. It is

fair to say that the overall reaction to the Bill has been underwhelming—lukewarm at best.

Ministers are delighted with it, but that is because it seems to be about removing burdens as

much on Ministers as on business. By my count, half the proposals in the Bill will take away

burdens from Ministers and the Government, and fewer than half will remove them from

business.

Once again, the Government’s rhetoric extends far beyond their reach. When we get into

Committee, and on Report, the Opposition will seek to remove or amend the iniquitous

clauses in the Bill and to improve the others. We look forward to the journey.

3.42 pm

Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD):

My Lords, it is strange having a Second Reading debate when the principles of the Bill seem

fairly straightforward and the argument will all be over the detail of the matters to be

deregulated, which are more properly dealt with in Committee

The Liberal Democrats believe that regulation plays a vital legislative function and can be

hugely important in protecting people, businesses and other interests, but we are critical of

overcentralisation in our national Government and we certainly accept the need, particularly

when recovering from a deep and damaging recession, to look critically at regulations to

simplify and eliminate those which are over-complex and outdated. We know, too, that many

of the jobs coming in the recovery are being created in the SME sector and among the self-

employed. That is critical to future competitiveness, flexibility and creativity in our economy.

We supported the Red Tape Challenge and the one-in, one-out system for new regulations

and the extension to the one-in, two-out policy. We accept that free markets do not simply

happen; we need regulation to ensure fair competition and free markets. Much has to be done

to simplify and reduce regulation as standardisation is increasingly achieved in the EU.

The Government having focused on deregulation, the Bill is an inevitable consequence. We

may argue in this House over some of the detail, but the direction and objectives we strongly

share. There are a number of measures that we welcome and have strongly supported. One of

the great successes of the coalition, building on the foundations left by the previous

Government, has been the growth in apprenticeships, with more than 2 million created in five

years at a time of strong economic adversity. The Bill seeks to put in place the new

framework for delivering apprenticeships proposed by the Richard review. The review

proposed a new, simplified structure of apprenticeships and funding to give employers a

greater say in their structure and content. This new approved apprenticeship scheme means

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that apprenticeships will be delivered to a recognised standard, with the Government funding

their part of the training aspects through HMRC. The Secretary of State will have the power

to amend the apprenticeship standard agreed with employers. Flexible, more efficient and

simpler administration will mean that authorities and employers can concentrate on updating

apprenticeships and improving standards. We strongly support this measure.

I also support the efforts to help local communities run functions in their communities

without undue regulation. It is obviously long overdue for us to look at the alcohol rules for

these events. I give credit to the Minister in the Home Office, Norman Baker, who has helped

to push through some of these reforms in the Bill. The sale of limited alcohol at community

events is to be deregulated. The exhibition of films in community premises not requiring a

licence, as it does currently, may be a small measure but is clearly long overdue. The

deregulation will encourage community participation and, indeed, promote our creative

industries.

We also support the whole complex deregulation on rights of way. I expect the devil is in the

detail. I suspect more differences will be revealed as we go on. However, we clearly needed

to ease the process of recognising public rights of way and dealing with registering historic

rights of way, which now seems to have the support of the principal stakeholders. Therefore,

we support deregulation in this area.

There are, however, some matters that will need attention when we get to the detail. Health

and safety has already been mentioned. With the growth of self-employment, we need to

make sure that the new provisions excluding the self-employed, except those in dangerous

occupations, do not simply create greater complexity rather than give a general commitment

to good health and safety practice. We need to look at the detail of this and be convinced by

it. On the right to buy, there is no great principle at stake in reducing the qualifying period

from five to three years, although I think we probably would have preferred to see how the

current measures stand up over time. However, we do not want to see social-needs housing

simply become a way of finding an incentive to home ownership. The objective of that

housing should be to serve social needs. The key issue is whether we will use the proceeds

from the social housing sold to add to the housing stock, rather than diminish the social

housing stock as we have done over the past 30 years, except in the past couple of years of

this Government.

On the licence fee, clauses provide for an appropriate review of penalties for non-payment.

We accept that it is a review but we are not necessarily being committed to how that will be

done in the future. Ideally, it should be done at the same time as the charter review. The key

should be to look at how any new system can improve on the current low level of evasion and

reduce the £111 million cost of collection. The BBC cannot stop people using its services

without paying the licence fee, unlike its competitors, such as Sky. We should be aware that

if the BBC reverts to the utilities’ record of dealing with bad debt, it will lose £200 million of

revenue.

We welcome the Government’s commitment to reducing and simplifying unnecessary

regulation. It is needed to improve the country’s competitive advantage and that should be a

preoccupation of all elements of government and, indeed, the country as a whole, particularly

in relation to small businesses, which often hold the burden of regulation. This is one small

step to grasp the need for simpler legislation, which does not hold back the creative and

dynamic aspects of small businesses. Small steps will help but we will need many more.

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3.49 pm

The Lord Bishop of Truro:

My Lords, I think that I need to begin with an apology. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord

Stevenson, for drawing our attention to matters relating to dog collars. I was not going to

refer to them but I will make sure that one of my colleagues does when we get to Committee.

I have no more interest than any other Member of this House in regulation for its own sake.

In fact the New Testament, on the principle that,

“where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”,

specifically warns people against submitting to unnecessary regulations in matters of religion.

This is something on which I will comment when we get to York later this week for the

meeting of the General Synod.

In the same spirit, I welcome many of the provisions in this very miscellaneous Bill. The

exemption of members of the Sikh community from the requirement to wear safety helmets

in carefully defined circumstances has been consistently asked for by that community—and

since the Health and Safety Executive supports it, so do I. The additional test required from

driving instructors with a disability is unnecessary: every applicant should be tested for their

suitability to do the job on the same basis. Many other provisions update past legislation on

the basis of change in technology or of circumstances. The fact that we can use more

sophisticated and reliable equipment to test drivers for drink or drugs at the roadside, for

example, is very welcome, and it is reasonable to permit healthcare professionals, for whom

this sort of work is normal in other professional contexts, to carry out such tests.

I will comment on the closing of prisons, even though I am the bishop for a county in which

there is not a single prison. The removal of the requirement for a statutory order to close a

prison, when none is needed to open one, is logical enough. However, we should not let this

pass without observing that closing a prison is not a trivial matter, in at least two respects.

First, the present wave of prison closures is shutting long-standing smaller prisons with a

strong track record of working constructively with offenders and building instead large

establishments, whose physical fabric is doubtless much superior to the old buildings but

whose effectiveness in actually reducing reoffending is, to say the least, unproven.

Secondly, closing prisons has a real and often negative effect on the communities in which

the prisons are set. There are cities where the closure of a prison has not only cost jobs but

worsened planning blight in that area. There are also rural communities that have been hard

hit by short-notice closures.

Some would regard any relaxation of rules about alcohol as a bad thing. As has been

commented already, the small revisions in this Bill to the licensing arrangements for the sale

of alcohol at informal and irregular community occasions seem a prudent step, which will not

catapult church halls irresistibly into the centre of the excesses of the night-time economy.

I also welcome the measures on rights of way. These will help to retain and protect

indefinitely those rights of way that have existed for centuries but do not necessarily appear

on the definitive map. I am much less enthusiastic, however, about the removal in Schedule

12

19 of a requirement to consult statutory bodies such as Natural England when proposing new

by-laws, orders or regulations. No longer will there be a requirement to consult,

“bodies whose statutory functions include giving advice to Ministers on matters relating to

environmental conservation”.

In total, there are 15 instances of the removal of the statutory duty to consult, but very few of

these proposals relate to obsolete bodies or legislation.

There are two aspects of the Bill which may be moving deregulation in the wrong direction.

First, as has been said, there is the removal from employment tribunals of the power to make

“wider recommendations”. The task of the tribunal would be solely to respond to the situation

of the particular person in front of it. If there were any evidence that tribunals had exceeded

their natural remit by ranging over issues remote from the one brought to them, there might

be cause for concern. There seems to be no such evidence.

If some injustice done to a particular employee is found not to be a one-off event but to be

due to an element of unfairness built into a policy or practice of the organisation, the most

economical way to deal with that is for the employment tribunal to point it out. For example,

if an employee has a just complaint of direct discrimination, the tribunal may well deal with

that as an isolated incident. If, however, the case is one of indirect discrimination, it is most

likely that there is something wrong embedded in the way in which the organisation works.

This clause would prevent the tribunal from making a sensible recommendation in such a

case. It is unclear how such a point, made at an early stage by an employment tribunal, could

amount to an illegitimate burden on a business when it may well remove the need for a more

complex resolution of the problem further downstream.

Clauses 73 to 76 impose a duty on regulators to have regard to the desirability of promoting

economic growth. I have great respect for the judgment and experience of the noble Lord,

Lord Heseltine, to whose report these proposals owe their origin, and his concern that

regulatory functions should not place any unnecessary check on economic growth.

Nevertheless, the integrity and independence of regulators is important. They come in many

varieties, of course, but at least some of them stand for objective principles of justice, in

many cases articulated in international law, and all of them must have regard to law. For

many of them, also, their independence is important, so a Bill that gives Ministers the power

to issue guidance on how regulatory functions can be exercised so as to promote economic

growth looks like a prima facie compromising of independence.

Of course I am not suggesting that anyone in this House regards economic growth as good in

all cases. A burgeoning industry in illegal drugs would be agreed by all not to be good—but

what about, for example, growth in the alcohol industry or the tobacco industry? Judgments

here would be more nuanced. Then there is the gambling industry. Current government

policy tends to see the gambling industry primarily as an engine of economic growth. To

place the Gambling Commission, for example, under a statutory duty of this kind is

questionable. In general, the question of whether or to what extent a particular type of

economic activity is a legitimate driver of economic growth is a moral one that should not

just be subsumed under a catch-all principle that regulators should promote economic growth.

The prevention of damaging or unjust economic activity, surely, is equally germane to their

mission.

13

3.57 pm

Lord Fowler (Con):

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate, who raised some

important issues, not least his final point about gambling. My general position is that one of

the most effective actions that any Government can take is to look at the regulations that are

in force to see if they are relevant in the modern day. It may be that they were entirely

sensible 20, 30 or 40 years previously when they were introduced, but the question is whether

today they still have the same force. It is not only that they may have no relevance; it may be

that they also hold back business development and, above all, prevent the development of

services that are to the benefit of the public.

I will give three very short examples from my own experience. When I was Transport

Secretary in 1979, we had an elaborate system for controlling the provision of coach services

up and down the country. If I wanted to run a coach service from Birmingham to London, I

had to go to the traffic commissioners and ask for permission. Invariably my application

would be opposed by British Rail and the National Bus Company on the grounds that they

already had services. Frequently the traffic commissioners would find for them. In other

words, the decision rested with the commissioners, not with the travelling public. We

abolished those restrictions and the result has been a very fast-developing coach service in

this country, which has meant a tremendous addition in cheap coach travel, particularly for

young people, up and down the land.

The second example is that when I was Health Secretary, we reviewed the regulations

governing opticians. Competition was limited. It all seemed very much, frankly, to the benefit

of the optician and not of the customer. Again, we deregulated, with the effect that today

there is a very competitive market, which is also to the benefit of the public.

The third example is perhaps the best known: the abolition of the regulations and restrictions

of the Dock Labour Scheme, about which my noble friend Lord Brabazon also knows a great

deal. I do not doubt the original intention and justification, but the days of exploitation of

labour had gone, and the trouble was that the regulations were standing in the way of port

development and new employment opportunities. I remember going to Liverpool and being

told—lectured, perhaps—on the need for me to direct sea traffic to the Mersey. This was self-

evidently not something which it was in my power to do, but what we could do was to take

away the restrictions. The result was that new business has developed in ports all round this

country. We have seen an utter transformation of that industry.

I am, therefore, a great supporter of sensible deregulation—and, indeed, in one or two areas,

which perhaps we can come to in Committee, I would go further. It encourages jobs when all

too often regulation destroys them. As far as I can judge, the vast majority of the measures in

this Christmas tree Bill—and I agree with that description—will be beneficial to the public. It

is the interests of the consumer that must always be pre-eminent.

Having set out my belief, I have two questions. The first is on health and safety. I

acknowledge that the Government have sought to be careful here, but I am concerned that too

much of the public debate starts from the premise that health and safety legislation is almost

by definition unnecessary. I dispute this. For many years I worked in the aggregates industry.

14

In the 1930s quarries were notorious for their accident record. Even in the postwar years their

record was not particularly good.

The irony was that, all too often, the injuries concerned people who were trying to help; they

were trying to get into motion a machine that had stuck and were then drawn into it. What

was needed was a culture of safety. To its great credit, the industry has taken giant steps to

respond to that. When I was chairman of one company and then on the board of an

international company, health and safety was the first issue on the agenda, before profits and

the results of that particular month or quarter.

I think that, if we believe in wider share ownership for the benefit of staff, we should be in

favour of measures to protect the safety of staff. The Government say that their measures will

not harm safety. I say only that, in Committee—and I echo one or two points that have been

made—we should be given more information on the self-employed occupations that will be

excluded by this legislation.

My noble friend Lord Gardiner will not be in the least surprised that my second question

concerns measures to decriminalise non-payment of the BBC licence fee. The most obvious

question about that is, “What on earth is it doing in this Bill in the first place?”. We have a

whole period of debate on the future of the licence fee and all the other broadcasting issues

that go with the royal charter.

The Government’s reply is that we cannot wait, but when it comes to the future of the BBC

Trust, virtually everybody agrees that it is a completely outdated and, dare I say it—well,

“useless” may be putting it a bit high, but it is certainly an outdated body.

Lord Rooker (Lab):

Did the noble Lord say “useless”?

Lord Fowler:

Yes; I said “useless”. We are told that we cannot consider that, and that we will go ahead

with the appointment of a new chairman for a body which, self-evidently, has the

executioner’s axe hanging over it.

The process of change here is not beyond criticism. We set up a review of an unspecified

nature, and then, depending on the review—the result of which, obviously, we know nothing

whatever about—we delegate to the Secretary of State the power to change the law, not by

primary legislation but by regulation. However well intentioned this clause may be, I do not

believe that giants of the past such as Enoch Powell or Michael Foot would have approved of

it as a measure and as a way of developing legislation in this House.

Therefore, self-evidently, there is much to discuss in Committee. Indeed, you might say that

the Bill provides the whole justification for this House, because we have the time to do that

while quite clearly the other House does not. As I said, I strongly approve of the direction of

travel of the Bill, but I also register that the detail deserves careful scrutiny and debate.

4.06 pm

Lord Rooker:

15

My Lords, I was very pleased to chair the Joint Committee on the draft Bill between October

and December last year, because I was coming to the end of my four years on the Food

Standards Agency, so I had not done much committee work in the House. I volunteered to do

the job that nobody else wanted to do, and that was the one that came up. However, I must

record that in my view and that of members of the committee, the Joint Committee received

the most exceptional support from the clerks in both Houses, and we let their respective

bosses know about that at the end of our deliberations.

By and large, I am pleased with the Government’s response to the report. The Joint

Committee ceased to exist once it had reported on 16 December last year, so I only speak for

myself on the Bill. Ministers removed and amended material, and carried out further

consultations as recommended by the Joint Committee. The key removal was of the massive

Henry VIII clause, which was described as an outstanding example of its type, and which

would have caused your Lordships’ House much waste of time. The lawyers and the

constitutionalists would have loved it, but it would have been a complete and utter waste of

time. It is not there any more. It was a bit cheeky that it was in the Bill in the first place;

Ministers and civil servants need to be on notice not to try to bypass Parliament again in the

way they tried in the draft Bill. I do not say that out of any romantic attachment to the House

of Commons, as the Minister patronisingly implied the previous time I spoke, but because

that is not a good way to do legislation. That is the fact of the matter with Henry VIII clauses.

I will refer to just a handful of matters in this Christmas tree Bill. It is true that, unlike most

Bills, the Long Title allows Members to hang any subject they like on this one. If the House

of Commons was full of campaigning Members of Parliament at the present time, they could

have had a field day on economic, social and constitutional issues that could have lasted for

months and months. However, it would be quite wrong for this House to do that, because we

are unelected, and I will not give examples of the kind of Bills, because it will only give

noble Lords ideas. I would have liked to have done some of that myself, but the opportunity

was not taken by the elected House, so the chance has been lost.

The Joint Committee concentrated on areas we had submissions on—several hundred of

them, although half were on the rights of way issue, which is a separate issue. Our view was

that if that was amended in any way and dealt with again, it should be a separate Defra Bill.

We think the package in the Bill should be maintained, because it is an agreed one, which is

important.

There should be two procedures to assist our scrutiny as the Bill comes to this House. They

are not new; I raised them before the previous general election. First, we should have a list of

subjects that have been added to the Bill after pre-legislative scrutiny and which therefore

have not been subject to pre-legislative scrutiny, and confirmation that they have been

consulted on. I do not think anything should be added to the Bill that has not had a

consultation. It is quite right to add things after pre-legislative scrutiny, but they have to be

consulted on. Secondly, a list of areas should be set out where the Commons, under the

timetable of the Bill, has not done its work. It has not discussed much of the Bill. The draft

Bill had 65 clauses; it now has 91. The draft Bill had 132 pages; it now has 204. As I said, I

have no problem with extra subjects being added—I know at least one which I fully support

that will be added by the Government and which has been subject to consultation. That is a

key element.

16

Although this is not dealt with in the Bill, the Joint Committee had views on the use and

abuse of the Law Commission, from which we took evidence. It was crystal clear that there

was massive tension between the Law Commission and Ministers in the Cabinet Office. The

plain fact is that Ministers in general take no interest at all in the Law Commission’s trawl

tidying up Bills every three years. As such, the departments do not take any interest. For

example, when the Law Commission did its trawl of departments in 2011, the legislation

listed as being “no longer of practical use” in Schedule 20—originally Schedule 16—could

have been offered up by the departments. Not a single subject in that schedule was offered by

the departments because of uninterested Ministers and lazy Permanent Secretaries. However,

in this case it is the result of Cabinet Office Ministers saying to their colleagues in other

departments, “We want three or four subjects that are no longer of use and we want them in a

Bill”. When Ministers do that for colleagues, the department then takes an interest because

the Ministers are interested. We then end up with Schedule 20. That is not a good way to deal

with legislation.

It appeared as though there was an attempt to bypass the Law Commission. I do not say that

in a critical way, but that is what it looked like. I plead guilty, by the way, because I have

been there, so I know what happens; there is some guilt there. The Law Commission has been

doing this work for 60 years, and there is only one occasion when it recommend abolishing a

subject that it later turned out was still in use. It has a good track record on this; both Houses

trust the Law Commission. Can the Minister confirm whether the issues in Schedule 20 have

been checked again?

I will briefly mention two or three points from the Bill. I strongly support non-economic

regulators having to take growth into account. I accept there will be problems regarding the

Equalities and Human Rights Commission, but the growth duty must complement and not

override the regulator’s existing duties. That is what we were informed would be the case. At

all times it is essential that consumer and public confidence is maintained in the relevant

regulator.

I used an example in the committee from when I was at the Food Standards Agency—before

the Bill saw the light of day. We constantly pointed out that we regulated on the basis of risk,

not size. However, we had no problem embracing a growth duty, simply because the meat

industry cannot export to Russia and China, for example, where requirements on abattoirs are

greater than in the EU, unless the FSA has regulated and can sign off those businesses. We

encouraged growth because we ensured those businesses conformed to the rules and

requirements of, for example, the Russian Government. That was an important element. At

another time we said no to the idea of stopping regulating kitchens in village halls. Kitchens

in village halls can kill people if they are dirty, just as kitchens in large hotels can. It is not a

question of size, but of risk. It can therefore be adequately embraced by non-economic

regulators.

There are two or three other changes. I am coming to the end of my speech and I will be

brief. We did not take any evidence on the clause on marine accident investigations. We

ought to look at that a bit more closely as it goes through this House. We should look at

removing the automatic duty to reorder a hearing in the light of new evidence. The cases of

the “Gaul”, which sank in 1975 and was discovered in 1997, and the MV “Derbyshire”,

which sank in 1980 and was found in 1994, are both highly relevant.

17

I shall not say much about health and safety, although we took a lot of evidence on it. Like

the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, I had an interest in this. My maiden speech in the other place 40

years ago was on industrial safety. All my experience had been in manufacturing industry,

with people doing things wrong, guards not working and so on. I realise that that is not

necessarily covered here but it is the culture that is important. I remember that I sat as a

member of the Standing Committee on the health and safety Bill, which resulted from the

work of the Robens committee. Industry in this country had a disastrous record on safety in

general. It has vastly improved over the years and we do not want to turn the clock back.

I do not think that the Government have got the legislation right on insolvency practitioners.

Clearly there was a massive difference in the evidence from Ministers and from the

insolvency profession. I do not think that the Bill should be left as it is, with three choices. In

most cases, practitioners told us that they cannot work out what kind of case it will be until

they start working on it. It might look like a private case but, at the same time, it might also

be corporate. Therefore, there is a real problem and it will lead to confusion. This needs to be

cleared up. I think that the Government have got it wrong here.

The Government have also been stubborn in Clause 61 in abolishing the powers of the Senior

President of Tribunals to report on standards. Frankly, I think that tribunal standards ought to

be reported on by the senior president so that Parliament knows whether the tribunals are up

to the job. That work is not burdensome. Likewise, as has already been referred to, the

Government have persisted in getting rid of the power of employment tribunals to make

wider recommendations. I think that that is a mistake and that it ought to be looked at again.

As for the new material, the Government have only themselves to blame here. I am not

complaining about the new material, but we have to do our job properly. This legislation will

affect millions of people in their daily lives in very diffuse ways that cannot be pinned down

because it is not just one piece of legislation that is relevant here. As we have heard, a

massive amount will affect at least a dozen departments.

This House has to be given the opportunity and the time to do its job, particularly on the

clauses not dealt with by the House of Commons due to the timetabling of legislation. That is

not a complaint; it is the reality and it is what we are here for. We are a revising Chamber—

we are not here to start this Bill—and this will be a really good test of whether we do our job

properly. Whether we are elected or unelected does not make any difference.

4.17 pm

Lord Tope (LD):

My Lords, I very much echo the closing comments of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I begin

by declaring my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. That is

quite a substantial interest for this Bill because local authorities are the regulatory authority

responsible for implementing many of these and other regulations. They have people with the

detailed knowledge and experience on the ground of how well the regulations work or, as it

quite often the case, how they do not work. Therefore, it is a significant interest and I suspect

that it is going to take up a considerable amount of time in the months ahead.

Until May this year, I also had the huge pleasure of serving as a representative of European

Union regional and local government on a European Commission body with the rather grand

18

title of the High Level Group of Independent Stakeholders on Administrative Burdens. It was

intended to deal with the never-ending task of trying to reduce the regulatory burdens

imposed by the European Union. I learnt quite a lot of things there but I learnt two in

particular as we went from, first, the Better Regulation programme to Smart Regulation and,

in my closing months, to Regulatory Fitness, known as REFIT. First, I learnt that, as the

Minister said in his introduction, better regulation most certainly does not mean no

regulation; it means appropriate regulation that is fit for purpose—and a purpose that is both

necessary and proportionate. The other thing that I learnt was that somewhere there was

always someone who thought that those regulations were necessary. Those people are still

there and they still think that the regulations are necessary. There is always a reason for

having regulations and there are always some people who think that they are good and

necessary.

In the time available, I simply want to highlight just one or two causes of concern in the Bill.

Overall, I certainly join my noble friend Lord Stoneham in welcoming the Bill. I know from

my work in Brussels that the Red Tape Challenge—one in, one out and, even more

particularly, the one-in, two-out process of the UK Government—was very much admired in

the European Union. We spoke on it quite often and had presentations from the UK

Government on its effectiveness. There were even attempts to try to introduce it to the

European Commission, which was sometimes just a little less enthusiastic in its support.

I come from the point of view of welcoming the direction and intention of this Bill—

there are many parts that we will certainly welcome—but, inevitably in debate and in

Committee, we talk about those things on which we are less happy and rather more

concerned. The ones that I particularly want to highlight in the few minutes available

today start with Clauses 9, 10 and 11 and concerns over private hire measures. Here, I

shall quote from a letter from the police and crime commissioner for Dorset to my

honourable friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole, who unfortunately

received it just after the Bill left the House of Commons. The commissioner was alerted

to the provisions by the police and crime commissioner for Greater Manchester and

feels that,

“an unintended consequence of these measures is to potentially increase the risk of

crime and incidents, such as serious assaults and thefts, following a night out”.

We can go into more detail on that in Committee, but he seeks support in lobbying for

the removal of these clauses and,

“instead, for the introduction of a dedicated Taxi Bill along the lines proposed by the

Law Commission. Their draft bill has been written after extensive research and

consultation and would give the opportunity for much better scrutiny of major reforms

of an important industry”.

I understand that it is now rather too late in this Parliament to be introducing such a

substantive Bill as a draft taxi Bill, but I hope that the Minister will say in his reply why

the Government have chosen not to do that and have instead introduced measures that

at least two police and crime commissioners—and many others, I am sure—feel are

deeply unsatisfactory and worrying.

19

The next clause about which I am concerned is Clause 34—I speak as one who, until May,

had been a London councillor for 40 years—on the short-term use of London

accommodation. I ask the Minister: who was consulted by the Government before they

introduced that clause? I ask that in particular because the clause is opposed quite strongly by

London Councils, the body representing all 32 London boroughs and the City of London. It is

opposed quite strongly by Westminster City Council, arguably the one that will be most

affected by these provisions. Reflecting on the financial incentives for engaging in short-term

letting, it makes the point that in 2005 the rent that could be charged for a short-term let

property was 273% higher than comparable rents for private sector rental properties. It is

understandably very concerned about that. It is not only the London local authorities that are

concerned about the provisions in this clause. I have had representations from the Bed and

Breakfast Association and the British Hospitality Association. They are all concerned about

the effect that this clause, if implemented as it stands, will have on the letting property market

in London. This will need much more careful consideration in Committee.

In my last two minutes, I turn to two clauses that concern me: Clause 38 on parking and

Clause 43 and Schedule 11 on waste collection. Anyone who has been a councillor for any

length of time knows that the two subjects you never, ever touch within a year of an election

are parking and waste collection. Why on earth are the Government interfering in these

matters within a year of a general election? Despite that foolishness, I have to ask again about

those two core activities—the core business of local authorities. Minister after Minister in all

parties will say that it is local people who know best and that one size does not fit all. Why

are the Government now trying to interfere and to regulate—never mind within a year of a

general election—in these matters that are essential to local government?

My 40 years as a local councillor were spent representing a controlled parking zone in a town

centre area vital to the local economy. We all know that one size does not fit all. That was in

the London Borough of Sutton. It has a different regime from the Royal Borough of Kingston

next door, or the London Borough of Croydon next door or indeed the London Borough of

Wandsworth, which I know the Minister knows particularly well. Why are the Government

interfering? What is the justification for this? We will go into it in very much more detail in

Committee. However, as I think has been mentioned, the consultation from the Department

for Transport on parking received a lot of responses, almost all of them hostile. On the issue

of the CCTV ban, which this clause covers, six of the eight organisations responding—from

the British Parking Association to cycling and disability groups—were strongly opposed to

the Government’s proposed ban. Only two had a mixed reaction, one of which was from the

motoring organisations, so even they were not unanimously agreed on the ban. We still do

not know exactly what the exemptions are. It is difficult in this area to distinguish between

what are actually government proposals and what has come from the Friday afternoon press

release from the Secretary of State, preparatory presumably to his Friday evening in the pub,

where most of these utterings seem rather better fitted than to legislation.

Waste collection again is causing considerable concern to local authorities, not least the likely

increased cost and complexity of introducing these additional regulations. As has been said,

this is a big deregulation Bill. I thought that the clue might be in the name. In fact we are

proposing to introduce more regulation, which will make carrying out the essential task of

waste collection more complex and more expensive. I know that my noble friend the Minister

is, if anything, an even stronger localist than I am. I look forward in his closing speech to his

justification for why these measures meet the test of proportionality and necessity.

20

4.27 pm

Lord Monks (Lab):

My Lords, I, too, will comment on a small number of proposals in this Deregulation Bill and

touch on two issues that are not in the Bill but are relevant to it. The first issue is the concern

expressed by some other noble Lords who have contributed to the debate—Clause 1, which

aims to limit the general duty on the self-employed to comply with the Health and Safety at

Work etc. Act 1974. Only those who are definitely picked out would be covered by the Act in

future if the Bill goes through.

As the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Rooker, have made clear, this is a pretty big

change to the existing provisions and is a genuflection to those who consistently sneer at the

health and safety culture, which may have its ludicrous moments from time to time but

generally has served this country well. If you look at international league tables on, say,

skills, health and safety, industrial relations or productivity, the one that Britain comes top in

now is good health and safety. On the others we are languishing in a lower position than is

comfortable. Therefore, this is an area of excellence and I pay tribute to all those who have

done a good job in making it like that. It seems to me now that to give the self-employed the

impression that they are going to be outside the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act is a big

error. A process of prescription would no doubt be controversial, rather costly and protracted.

Different sectors will argue like mad about whether they should be in the scope of the Act. I

think that more red tape rather than less is being introduced.

I am not alone in thinking that this prescribing will be onerous, so the effect of Clause 1 will,

I think, be to remove most of the self-employed from the general duty under the Health and

Safety at Work etc. Act. I know other figures have been given but it is going to be quite a

process arguing whether you are in or out. It will be confusing to the average self-employed

worker who is thinking, “Am I covered, am I not covered?” and will be referred no doubt to a

lawyer and to the subsections in a particular piece of legislation. I recognise that this was

recommended by the majority of the Löfstedt review of health and safety regulation, but the

subsequent consultation by the Health and Safety Executive has shown many to be against it,

arguing that confusion and possibly increased risk will result.

The present system covers everybody. At least it is straightforward; it works. The message is,

“Don’t take risks with other people’s health and safety—or, indeed, your own”. Under the

Bill, will that change? Will the impression be different? It could well be, and many will not

bother to take it quite so seriously as they did in the past. Worse, people who control a

workplace with many self-employed people—often bogus self-employed; they are doing the

same jobs as employees—will tend to think that they have no duty of care and guess that they

are exempt from the law. The most dangerous industries, such as agriculture and

construction, have a high proportion of the self-employed. The confusion from this clause in

those sectors could cause complacency and poor practice. The Government have today

published a consultation on health and safety, proposing that construction becomes a

prescribed industry, but the exact borders of that are not clear. I understand that already a lot

of questions are being raised about it.

On self-employment in general, the fatality rate per 100,000 is already twice that of

employees. Self-employment is rising quickly in this country: 9%—330,000—since 2008,

while 40% of the new jobs that have been created since 2010 are self-employed. Going

21

freelance has been very much the fashion, or maybe the only option, for many. The increase

has been marked in all sorts of occupations that you do not associate with self-employment or

freelance working: admin, secretarial work, sales and customer service and, perhaps more

traditionally, personal service occupations. It would be naive to think that all these people

were budding entrepreneurs. Many of them are the bogus self-employed, relieving an

employer of his obligations under PAYE, national insurance, pensions and employment law,

with many of the workers concerned thinking that they are going to get a tax advantage out of

being self-employed. This measure could be a further incentive to go self-employed, or to be

forced to give up employee status. It is wrong and it could be dangerous. It is encouraging to

see Members of the House on all sides raising questions about this. I hope that the

Government will consider these representations seriously.

There is a complete change with my next concern. Clauses 10 and 12 on private hire

cars and taxis were touched on by my noble friend Lord Stevenson. The purpose is to

reduce the effects of the current rules that apply to taxis and private hire. I will not go

into detail, but there will be more unlicensed and less controlled private hire and taxi

drivers flooding the streets than before if this goes through. The risk, particularly to

women travelling in cabs and taxis at night, is being highlighted by the Suzy Lamplugh

Trust, the Local Government Association, Unite, the GMB and RMT, the main unions

concerned with workers in this area. I ask the Government to take this threat,

particularly to women, very seriously indeed.

The role of the local authority licensing body becomes much more difficult under these

provisions. In a sense, one risk of deregulation is that you merely move the pinch point

somewhere else. Licensing these people, and being responsible to a degree for what goes

wrong in this area, will become a new industry if we are not careful. It would be a real

problem.

I mentioned that I wanted to talk about a couple of things that are not in the Bill. I can do that

very briefly. I was looking for the deregulation of trade unions. After all, as Members of the

House will know, we are awash with scrutineers and assurers. The lobbying Bill added

£500,000 to the costs of the average large trade union just recently. We are swamped with

regulation. The fact that a strike is scheduled for later this week seems to have prompted the

Conservative Benches to suggest all kinds of new regulations in relation to strikes, as if a law

every two years on trade unions, when the Conservatives were in power, was not enough. I

think that it would have been a very good idea to apply the Deregulation Bill to trade unions,

but that does not seem to have crowded on to, at least, the Conservative Party’s agenda. I

want to encourage them, in a genuine spirit of helpfulness, to go down that road. I do not

even have to be consulted too much about it, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, suggested, if a

new clause comes in.

On the second area, I am pleased to see that the Bill does not propose to make further

changes to the Sunday trading rules. A big lobby has been pressing for provisions in the Bill

and I am pleased to say that the Government, so far, have not accepted them. Long may that

continue.

4.36 pm

Lord Naseby (Con):

22

My Lords, I had the privilege of serving on the Bill committee under the superb chairmanship

of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I should also like to pay tribute to the clerks who backed us

up. They did a superb job on a very tight schedule—we were given the best part of just over

12 weeks. The Government set us the target of reporting by Christmas. We stuck to that

target and I think we did as good a job as any committee could hope to do in that time span.

We recognised that this is a very important part of the Government’s programme. I pay

tribute to the Ministers who gave evidence to us. I commiserate with the Minister who will

take the Bill through in all its detail, but it is a very important part of the Government’s

legislation and one that I greatly welcome.

However, something changed en route and it appears that, in reality, we looked at only two-

thirds of the Bill at best. As someone who has been Chairman of Ways and Means in the

other place, the situation jars with me when colleagues from all sides have worked extremely

hard to take evidence, to listen to it, to reflect on and question it, and have proposed to the

Government of the day that certain changes should be made. In fairness, the Government

respond very positively in almost all areas to the committee’s evidence and

recommendations. However, we then discover in Committee that a number of new clauses

appear on the horizon, which get a fairly peremptory examination. Even more surprising, we

discover on Report that new clauses appear in the Bill.

I must say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that, in all conscience, the Government are

not being fair to the public, who justifiably want to give their voice on clauses that come

forward, and I do not think the Government are being fair to Parliament as a whole.

Inevitably, I suspect, that will mean that the Committee stage will take rather longer here than

it otherwise would. Looking back on the previous Session, I seem to remember that we had to

break early because there was no work to be done. The same applied at the other end. So I

question why, when we had a perfectly good, succinct, tight Bill, the decision was taken to

add other bits. Was it that certain departments of state were a bit slothful in coming forward

or was it that Ministers got a little too enthusiastic? In future, I hope that there will be an

annual Bill that is tightly drawn. As the noble Lord said in his introductory comments, it is

the deregulatory dimension that we all want in Parliament, rather than the repositioning of

existing legislation. I hope that can be really tightly drawn and stuck to. That way, across

government as a whole, we would be doing the public a great service.

I will just mention three other areas. First, in the Law Commission, there is a body to review

laws that are out of date. We took evidence and, frankly, we were somewhat aghast at how

long it took to do its job. Parliament, particularly Ministers, should be putting pressure on the

Law Commission to move faster. The Law Commission said to us that it did not have the

resources to do it. If it is beneficial to the public, particularly the public purse, Ministers and

the Law Commission need to sit down and find a way of making what is called the SLRs

work better. We said in our original report that there should be an annual SLR Bill. I do not

need an answer today—my colleagues and I would like the answer in writing—but my

question is: have there been consultations with the Law Commission and, if so, what were the

results of those deliberations?

Secondly, we received evidence from BALPPA, which regulates the leisure park industry in

our seaside towns up and down the country. It gears up its programme of events, et cetera, to

the school holidays. We questioned the association quite deeply because the Bill proposes

that we should deregulate school terms. I am a grandfather, and there must be other

grandfathers here, and fathers. Honestly, what we really want is predictability. If you have a

23

boy and a girl, you want to know that they and their friends will be on holiday at the same

time. I hope that we can have another look at that. Certainly, if you look at the evidence from

the USA, where they deregulated around Labor Day, absolute chaos flowed and it adversely

affected the tourism industries. I ask the Minister: has there been any economic assessment of

the impact of deregulating school holidays on tourism jobs in the seaside areas? I think that is

important.

My third point concerns the economic growth duty, which I spoke about at some length in the

committee. I believe it is absolutely fundamental that every department of state thinks about

the economic impact of what it does. That applies to the whole lot. We had what I would call

some howls of protest from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, saying that we would be

interfering with its role in life; in particular, it might be struck off the list in Europe. I totally

fail to see how it would interfere with any of the human rights bodies if we—society—asked

them to reflect at length on the impact of anything they do, propose or criticise. That is what

we recommended in our report and it seems entirely justifiable from society’s point of view.

4.43 pm

Baroness Andrews (Lab):

My Lords, I, too, had the privilege of serving on the Select Committee under the energetic

leadership of my noble friend Lord Rooker. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord

Naseby. I agree with much of what he says but there are a few things that I will take issue

with.

The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, who is not in his place, put forward some very impressive

examples of effective regulation but I think he would agree with me—and picking up what

the Minister said—that what we have in the Bill is one of those exercises that Ministers and

officials across Whitehall absolutely dread. The call to arms went out from the Cabinet

Office: “Something more must be done about regulation so it is your job to find more

examples of regulation and bring them forward”. At a long stretch, many departments did

bring things forward, so amid the many useful things in the Bill—the Select Committee

commended the Bill in many respects—we have a real mishmash of odd initiatives, ranging

from fire, fuel and farriers to the defence of the grey squirrel and much else, as we have

already seen. As the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, very eloquently put it, the Bill has proved an

irresistible magnet for all manner of things which the committee never had a chance to look

at and which the House will want to debate. These measures were shoved in without warning,

consultation or thought for the implications for public safety and security, as my noble friend

Lord Monks said. I am sure that this will be followed up by many noble Lords.

We make it very clear in our support for the Bill that we are in full support of proportionate

regulation to enable enterprise of all sorts to flourish—who could not be? The Bill, however,

suffers from being, in large part, opportunistic. Indeed, there are elements of the Bill, as we

explored in our debate, about the cavalier treatment of Parliament itself. The Bill will benefit

from close scrutiny from your Lordships. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has already

discussed the extraordinary Clause 51 in the draft Bill which would have given Ministers

carte blanche to declare, by order, that certain legislation could be removed,

“if the Minister considers that it is no longer of practical use”.

24

Our evidence found that neither officials nor Ministers could tell us what on earth that clause

actually meant, let alone what it would do; so, very sensibly, Ministers decided to throw it

out. My only surprise was that the reason they gave was that there was no public appetite for

it. I should have thought that that was the least reason, frankly.

A lot of fun went out of the committee when we lost that clause, but we still became very

involved with the sorts of issues raised, for example, by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, about the

Bill’s title and whether the Bill was, indeed, deregulatory in every respect. Decriminalisation

as regards household waste, for example, is hardly deregulatory in a conventional sense.

Likewise, we have examples in which the burden of regulation is simply shifted from one

agency to another, as in some of the education clauses. My prime concern in this respect is in

relation to the new duties that are created. I have to part company, sadly, with the noble Lord,

Lord Naseby, over the duty to promote growth in Clause 83. This, in a Bill which aims at

decluttering, is a massive piece of new clutter.

I am grateful to the Minister for circulating the draft guidance, but can he tell us in the wind-

up, in fewer words than Ministers tried to tell us in the Joint Committee, how, by creating a

new duty, the Government are minimising the burden on public bodies? We do not need to be

told in statute how important growth is, so why on earth is this in the Bill at all? Many

regulatory bodies work within a remit that presumes and encourages growth, as the noble

Lord, Lord Rooker, has already pointed out. The regulator I know best, English Heritage,

conducts its primary work of conservation within the balance of priorities established, after

long debate, around sustainable growth as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework.

The committee has been assured, and the House was assured this afternoon, that the clause

will not confuse or override existing requirements. However, where are the safeguards that

regulators will not be hauled up to account for their lack of success or lack of sincerity in

promoting growth? The draft guidance, which I was grateful to see, in fact leaves it to the

regulators to decide for themselves where the balance lies. It states:

“The growth duty does not automatically take precedence over or supplant existing duties

held by regulators—Section 2”.

What does “not automatically” mean in this context? In their response to the committee the

Government said:

“The final guidance will be published at an early stage to support Parliamentary passage of

the Deregulation Bill”.

Can we have an assurance that this will be available before Committee stage in the autumn?

In short, there is a real concern that this clause could cause genuine mischief. It could be used

to pressurise bodies and distort their proper functions as well as creating additional burdens to

demonstrate compliance. That is not just the non-economic regulators, which have a

particular problem, but the economic regulators as well. The clue as to how the Government

think it will work is what the Minister said in another place—that in the last resort a business

will use judicial review. I am astonished by that. Not only is it a totally inappropriate

expectation to build into the legislative process, it completely sidesteps the Government’s

plans to emasculate judicial review that we in this House discussed only last week. Frankly, I

would much rather all this be in the Bill, where we could see it with some security. I appeal

25

to the Minister not to use this crude definition of growth but to go back to the tried and tested

definition of sustainable growth, which has been worked out in practice and is so much more

consistent and sensible. Otherwise we will be into short-term improvisations regarding the

nature of growth, and that would be really dangerous.

Clause 1 has already been raised as a cause of concern around the House. Our committee had

several witnesses who described the changes as unnecessary, unhelpful and unwise. I know

that the prescribed list has been published, but it is vague in parts, and it is not clear whether

some trades are in or out. There is another aspect which exercises me: the clause requires the

prescribed list to be set out by negative resolution. This is for a change which will have a

major impact on safety at work. When that was challenged, the Minister gave us the reason

for not using an affirmative order—that the increase in parliamentary time that would be

required was not considered appropriate. We see many inadequate explanations for

inadequate parliamentary scrutiny, but that is one of the worst.

Another set of policy issues flares up around the housing clauses. First, we have the reduction

from five years to three years in the qualifying period for the right to buy. In all logic, given

the housing crisis in this country, it is bizarre to reduce the permanent housing stock any

more. Evidence from the LGA suggests that for every seven local authority homes lost, only

one new one has been built. Will the Minister give a commitment to publish the impact

statement before Committee? We have wasted an opportunity here to enable councils to fill

the housing gap. The Bill could have allowed for the full retention of receipts by local

authorities and been the vehicle to remove the housing borrowing cap.

We have in Clause 32 a useful and almost welcome new provision to create new powers for

the Secretary of State to include optional requirements in building regulations. That means

that, for the first time, new homes can be built which are flexible and adaptable for people

growing old and people with disabilities. However, it is optional. It needs to be a

requirement, not least because the only place where this is happening is in London—our

thanks are due, first, to Mr Livingstone and then to Mr Johnson. If the requirement is

optional, it will deter other local authorities from following the very good lead set by London.

There is much that we will return to in the Bill. There is no doubt that it has been cobbled

together, and there is the sound of barrels being scraped in many clauses. However, there are

useful things in it, too. I look forward to a more forensic examination in Committee.

4.52 pm

Lord Mackay of Drumadoon (CB):

My Lords, the two clauses in the Bill that I want to touch on briefly, Clauses 18 and 61, have

caused the Law Society of Scotland some concern over their possible implication and

consequences. It wishes these concerns to be raised at this stage of the Bill, but it may be

necessary or appropriate to return to them in Committee.

Clause 18 seeks to alter the regime for insolvency practitioners by introducing a new regime

of partial authorisation for an insolvency practitioner. Such a partial authorisation would

entitle an individual to act in insolvency related only to companies or another individual to

act in insolvency related to individuals. Full authorisation would be reserved for someone

who was authorised to act in relation to companies, individuals and insolvent partnerships.

26

The Law Society of Scotland understands that, in England, the law relating to the insolvency

of corporate bodies is separate from that relating to the insolvency of individuals. It is

therefore easier to understand why one might want to split up the authority to act into a

partial authorisation. On the other hand, in Scotland there is no such separation between the

law applicable to corporate work and the law applicable to individuals. The Law Society’s

concern is that many of the statutory instruments that are currently required to be followed by

insolvency practitioners in Scotland could not be confined within a partial authorisation, as

proposed in Clause 18.

It might be asked why the Law Society should be concerned about this, because the obvious

solution might be that everyone in Scotland wishing to be an insolvency practitioner should

just apply for full authorisation. However, it seems perfectly commendable that the Law

Society’s concern should be drawn to the Government’s attention, to see whether this clause

requires examination in a little more detail at later stages.

The other clause that has given rise to concern is Clause 61. This provides that Section 15A

of the Social Security Act 1998, which deals with the functions of the Senior President of

Tribunals, should be amended to omit the provisions that require preparing and publishing an

annual report on standards of decision-making in certain decisions made by the Secretary of

State, against which an appeal lies to the First-tier Tribunal. In other words, the Senior

President of Tribunals has publicly to make an annual report on the view taken about the

standards of decision-making, in certain decisions made by the Secretary of State and his or

her staff.

The Explanatory Notes to the Bill state that arrangements have been put in place to

compensate for consequences of removing this statutory duty on the Senior President of

Tribunals. They go on to state:

“Alternative and more direct methods for providing feedback from the judiciary to the

Secretary of State have in practice been developed”,

and been effective. Speaking as a judge for a number of years, I was unaware of any

alternative and more direct method for providing feedback to the Secretary of State, other

than issuing a judgment or opinion once a case was decided. Again, I suggest, the Law

Society commendably considers that these alternative methods should be specified at this

stage, before the Bill goes much further.

I do not expect the Minister to be in a position to comment in detail on these matters. The

first is quite complicated and I have advised the Law Society that we should write to the

Minister’s department for this to be considered fully. If there then has to be a debate on it at a

later stage, all those taking part can be properly informed about the issues and arguments, one

way or another.

4.58 pm

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab):

My Lords, I will focus on Clause 52 and Schedule 16, which the Government introduced late

in May, after the draft Bill had been considered by my noble friend Lord Rooker and his

Committee. I will take a somewhat different line to previous contributors who have spoken

27

favourably about Clause 52. This clause deals with selling alcohol at community events and

ancillary licences. Part of this Bill includes the community and ancillary sellers notice, which

means that those whose core business is not selling alcohol or providing regulated

entertainment can sidestep regulations to sell alcohol as part of a wider business contract.

What we have here is not really a deregulation but a new form of alcohol licensing—in a

sense, a do-it-yourself application form of licensing—which we have not seen before. It will

remove barriers currently faced by certain businesses such as hairdressers and tanning salons,

and make it simpler and cheaper to obtain a new community and ancillary seller’s notice. It

will make it much harder for local licensing officers to object to them. Overall, it will mean

even easier access to alcohol. It means alcohol being available in a whole new range of

settings with very little oversight of its sale and consumption.

That is all within the context of the worrying rising series of health harms. One person is

killed every hour these days by alcohol. Annually, 1.2 million people are admitted to hospital

due to alcohol-related causes. Liver disease is the only major disease against which we have

not been making progress over the past 10 years. Rates in people under 30 suffering from the

condition have increased by 112%. Of course, alcohol is a factor in almost half of all violent

crimes committed.

The intention to launch ancillary licences was first promised in the Government’s alcohol

strategy, published back in March 2012. However, the strategy also promised a minimum unit

price of 45p per unit and a public health licensing objective. Both those measures—I put this

very kindly indeed—have yet to materialise. Had we had them, they could have acted as

controls and safeguards to make sure that the ancillary licence policy would not lead to

increased consumption and increased strain on public services. Regrettably, we have not had

them.

A range of organisations has raised opposition to Clause 52 and the accompanying schedule.

Among them is the Alcohol Health Alliance, the British Medical Association, Alcohol

Concern and the Institute of Alcohol Studies, which recently stated:

“At a time when alcohol-related hospital admissions and deaths are on the rise, we need to

ask: is it sensible to encourage people to drink more?”.

Perhaps even more important is the impact that the legislation could have in normalising

alcohol as a must-have for almost every occasion. That is the important issue that the House

needs to address: the changing culture which the Bill presents.

So far, the community aspect has principally been addressed. When the Government have

said that the Bill is mainly about community changes, they have prayed in aid the Women’s

Institute which, they claim, has been asking for the change to be introduced. I find it

somewhat baffling, and I suspect that the Women’s Institute may find it somewhat baffling,

that it is being offered licences for community events that start at seven o’clock in the

morning, because that is what the licences will offer. I think that the WI is being used as a

Trojan horse. It may not fully understand the rest of the legislation which is proposed along

with the community aspect. Perhaps even the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford, and

the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro, who have spoken favourably for the change,

have not looked at the ancillary side of the legislation

28

The legislation will offer the opportunity for alcohol to be sold, for the first time, by small

businesses—the so-called ancillary sellers. That could take place on a very wide scale indeed.

That is where the growth is likely to take place, not with community events. It is the prize

that the drinks industry has been looking for. It will be getting the quid pro quo offered to

them in the 2012 alcohol strategy for swallowing minimum unit pricing and public health

criteria being introduced into licensing considerations. However, they have managed, through

the pressures they put on the Government, to see and avoid those being introduced so far.

Instead they are now benefiting from the ancillary licences.

I regret that when my party dealt with this in the Commons, while raising objections and

generally being concerned, it did not push the issue to a Division. I am hoping that on

reflection, having looked at the evidence a little more carefully, it may be willing to change

its mind on that further down the line as we come to deal with the clauses. I just do not

believe that this change is going to be limited to what the Government describe as bed-and-

breakfast businesses. After all, how many bed-and-breakfast businesses are going to offer

alcohol for sale at seven o’clock in the morning? There are some crazy contradictions within

this policy.

I think that instead we are going to see instead a wide-scale application for the licences to go

into a whole range of areas where hitherto we have never seen alcohol on sale. Most certainly

hairdressers will apply to offer and sell alcohol, and health establishments, such as tanning

shops, will do the same. There is nothing, so far as we can see, that would prevent sandwich

bars starting to offer alcohol with sandwiches; nothing to stop cafes moving in that direction;

nothing to stop coffee shops—and even more.

When I addressed this topic during the debate on the Queen’s Speech, I asked the

Government whether I had got it right or wrong. I have had no replies so far, nor have any of

the other advocates opposed to this been able to establish just where the licences will end and

to whom they will be limited. I look to the Minister to see whether he can produce more

evidence of where it is likely to go. I think it is wrong to leave this for the consultation period

after the Act has gone through, and then put forward regulations, which we cannot change,

because by then the culture change will be well and truly under way. That, I believe, is not

what this House wants.

5.07 pm

Baroness Eaton (Con):

My Lords, I am very pleased to take part in this important debate. I declare an interest as a

previous chairman, and now a vice-president, of the Local Government Association. I

welcome the Government’s objective to bring forward legislation that will reduce any

burdens on local government and business in our communities. Removing red tape is an

important issue for local government, especially because of the vast statutory duties that local

government is responsible for. I believe that there are other aspects recommended by the

Local Government Association that will help councils deal with these burdens further, but

there are other elements in the Bill that need further consultation with local authorities.

Having looked through the Bill, I would welcome clarity on whether the Government have

consulted with the Local Government Association, particularly on Clauses 10 and 12 on

private licensing vehicle reforms and Clause 38 on parking, and what response they received

29

from the LGA. I note that the Government wish to deregulate private hire vehicles to help

families, but I wonder whether councils have been fully engaged with these proposals. Others

this afternoon have also raised their concerns on this clause. The noble Lord, Lord Monks,

has already mentioned women travelling in private hire cars. As a female, regular user of

private hire vehicles, Clause 10 raises concerns for me on safety and whether the person

driving the vehicle has been properly vetted. Will the Minister ensure that the Department for

Transport, if it has not done so already, meets with the Local Government Association to

discuss these reforms?

Similarly, I understand that many councils have raised concerns about the Government’s

proposals to ban the use of CCTV for parking enforcement. At this point, I must declare an

interest as I am a member of an advisory board for the Marston Group Ltd. I know that

councils are concerned about these proposals as they could prevent them from using CCTV

for parking enforcement, particularly outside schools, at bus stops, and on clearways. In

particular, we must ensure that children are protected from irresponsible parking outside

schools. As I understand it, the Bill allows the Secretary of State to exempt certain places

from a ban but if the Bill takes effect before the guidance is in force, it may be impossible to

enforce parking restrictions which will be referred to within the guidance. It would be helpful

if the Minister could agree to meet with the LGA on this very important issue.

Councils have been at the forefront of recycling over the past decade, with recycling rates

rising from 13%, 10 years ago, to 43% today. Clause 43 aims to deregulate the criminal

penalties for people who consistently refuse to deal with their household waste properly.

These proposals may have wider unintended consequences and an impact on those

individuals, their neighbours and the wider community. I am sure that the Minister will

congratulate councils on their efforts in increasing recycling rates over the years and on some

of the incentivising schemes that they now have in place to encourage recycling. Will my

noble friend look seriously at the potential implications for local communities of these

proposals? I am sure he would agree that we do not want recycling rates to decrease as a

result of councils having the inability, as the last resort, to enforce the law when they need to.

I draw two additional aspects to the attention of my noble friend, on local authorities’

licensing arrangements and statutory notices. First, will he look closely at the excellent

proposals being put forward to assist councils with cutting red tape from local business

through the Local Government Association’s document on rewiring licensing? As he is

probably aware, local government must issue more than 150 licences. The LGA’s proposals

would reduce unnecessary bureaucracy by allowing small businesses to apply for a single

licence, rather than the complex layers of licensing currently in place. I ask my noble friend

to look closely at the rewiring licensing document and commit to undertaking a review of all

local authority licensing regulations, and how they may be simplified as part of this Bill.

Secondly, statutory notice requirements which date from the early 1970s are burdensome on

councils; their publication process has not moved with the times. The Bill deals with elderly

legislation and reforms it for modern-day use. Will the Minister look at whether it could be

used in a similar fashion to update these requirements? Councils are spending £26 million a

year on advertisements when councils in England are facing a huge funding gap between

March 2014 and the end of 2015-16. Such adverts could be published in a digital form at

much less cost. Publication is very important but the medium used to do so must be

modernised.

30

The Bill provides great opportunities to support local councils and small businesses, which I

support, but I hope that my noble friend will note the concerns of local government and

consult with where necessary.

5.13 pm

Lord Dubs (Lab):

My Lords, I want to make just two points in relation to the Bill, as some others that I might

have made have already been covered adequately by Members of this House. My first

concerns Clauses 21 to 27 and Schedule 7 on public rights of way. I welcome the briefings

from the Open Spaces Society and the Ramblers, which I am sure many of us have received.

They are basically in support of these clauses, whose purpose is to speed up, streamline and

simplify the process for getting the official maps of public paths up to date. At the moment,

many of them are not. It is urgent because there is now a cut-off date of 1 January 2026—that

seems a long way ahead but we might get there very quickly—which means that if the

process has not been completed, any pre-1949 unrecorded routes will be extinguished. That

will be damaging for the rights of walkers, riders, cyclists and carriage drivers. I should say

that I am a very keen hill walker myself, so I feel close to this issue. These clauses came from

Natural England’s stakeholder working group on unrecorded public rights of way, so they

represent a consensus by representing the public path users’ body, the landowners, the

occupiers and the local authorities. That is a pretty impressive consensus, so I hope that these

clauses will go through unamended and unaltered because they represent something very

important.

My second point is quite different, and it is really a sin of omission. It concerns Section 73 of

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It is essentially a provision that adversely

affects the commercial television companies—that is, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. I

should say that I used to be chair of the All-Party Group on ITV and am now the vice-

chairman, and I have had very helpful briefings from some of the broadcasters.

To repeal Section 73 would be a clear deregulatory measure. Many representations have been

made to the Government, who seem to say two things in reply. The first is that there is

ongoing litigation between the public service broadcasters and TV catch-up. This has been

going on for some years. In fact it has been going on for such a long time that it is getting to

the stage of being like Jarndyce and Jarndyce. In any case, it is not appropriate to wait for

ever for litigation that is so prolonged. That is not right. Secondly, Oliver Letwin, a Minister

at the Cabinet Office, has said that this Bill is not the right vehicle for such change. My

goodness me, those of us who have been around for a long time know that, time and again,

Governments have two excuses for opposing things: either an amendment is technically

defective—well, I am not amending anything yet—or the Bill is not an appropriate vehicle

for such a change. That has been a standard excuse from Governments over the years. Oliver

Letwin, after saying that the issue is rather complicated so the Bill is not appropriate, then

does the other usual thing, which is to pass the buck. He says, “Try DCMS”. We have now

tried the Cabinet Office, DCMS and BIS. Government departments seem to be passing this

issue from one to the other. I shall argue in a moment that it is a clear deregulatory measure

and that the buck should not be passed any longer—particularly because if nothing happens

now, we will be stuck until after the election and heaven knows how long it will take.

31

Originally, Section 73 had a purpose, but that has gone. The passage of time has eroded it.

Indeed, the Bill says that other measures have become obsolete with the passage of time.

British television is at the heart of British creative industry. It is vibrant and dynamic and it

has great content and global reach. The way in which Section 73 works undermines

investment in our commercial television sector and is quite an outdated measure. There is no

longer a level playing field. What happens is that what are called third party aggregators,

often large companies, take the content for free without payments to those who have created

it. That seems quite wrong. The simple fact is that Section 73 is an historic measure, designed

effectively to deliver a subsidy from public service broadcasters to encourage cable rollout in

the 1980s. That is a long time ago now.

Section 73 prevents public service broadcasters having any form of negotiation for the supply

of PSB channels to the cable platform in the UK. There is not even a commercial opportunity

for them to negotiate. It is perverse that, for example, PSBs subsidise Virgin Media, which is

owned by Liberty Global, a multimillion-pound global TV distribution platform. We have

British television companies, some of which are doing fairly well but which are not that

affluent, subsidising an enormous global player. If Section 73 were to be repealed, that at

least would enable some form of commercial arrangement to be reached on cable

transmission but within the overall Communications Act framework. That framework

includes the “must offer” obligation of PSB channels to key platforms such as cable and

satellite, subject to the agreement of terms.

British television content is the envy of the world and its continued success depends on its

ability to get a return on investment. I am in the Labour Party and I am talking about business

and so on. This Bill provides an important opportunity to repeal Section 73. I urge the

Government not to miss the opportunity to consider amending the Bill to repeal the section. I

do not know what we are waiting for. It is not as complicated as the Cabinet Office says. It is

fairly straightforward. There has been so much discussion and negotiation. I think we ought

to get on with it. It would be best if the Government brought forward their own amendment. I

hope the Minister will agree to that, but, if not, I would like the Government at least to accept

a Back-Bench amendment on this issue.

5.20 pm

Lord Sharkey (LD):

My Lords, I, too, had the privilege of being a member of the Joint Committee that scrutinised

the Bill in draft form. As it turns out, it was very much in draft form. As many noble Lords

have said, the Bill is significantly different from the draft Bill. It is inevitable that such a

Christmas tree of a Bill will grow as it progresses, but that fact raises significant questions

about the role of pre-legislative scrutiny.

When the draft Bill came to us, it was 240 pages long. It was described by Ken Clarke as,

“a slight mountain of a Bill”.

It covered 10 ministerial departments and four agencies. It made changes to more than 70

underlying Acts. Some of these Acts made changes to previous Acts. The committee was

given 12 weeks to scrutinise all this. We thought this was inadequate, and we said so. We

would have pressed the point more strongly had we known that the Bill was to be carried

32

over. We found this out only when Oliver Letwin, in evidence to us, mentioned it in passing.

This seems entirely unsatisfactory. Perhaps when the Minister replies he could commit to a

more open discussion with pre-legislative scrutiny committees in future on the question of the

time necessary for thorough scrutiny. As it was, with this Bill we had no choice but to restrict

ourselves to certain areas and to leave others entirely unscrutinised.

I also ask the Minister to think about helping the process of scrutiny in another way. In a

complex Bill such as this, it would help greatly for references to underlying legislation to be

given a hypertext link. That is a lot easier than having 70 other Bills open before you. It

would have helped your Lordships’ House to have those hyperlinks in the text of the Bill.

Could I trust the Minister to commit to doing that well before Committee, which I understand

will start after Recess?

As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has mentioned, the original draft of the Bill proposed giving

Henry VIII powers to disapply legislation. The Joint Committee recommended that these

powers be removed. I am very glad that the Government have agreed to do that. In the course

of our inquiry into these and similar proposals in the Bill, however, it seemed to us that, as

the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has also said, there was an unhelpful tension between the

Government and the Law Commission. The draft Bill contains a schedule containing

legislation to be disapplied by order. The Government removed the order power but retained

the schedule. It is now Schedule 20 to the Bill. This schedule repeals parts of 28 separate

Acts. These range from the Nuclear Industry (Finance) Act 1977 through the Breeding of

Dogs Act 1973 to the Town Police Clauses Act 1847. Clause 82, which asserts that all this

legislation is no longer of any practical use, will repeal about 119 clauses. Some of these

clauses are poleaxed themselves.

Does anyone seriously believe that Parliament will subject these 119 clauses to close

scrutiny—or, indeed, any scrutiny at all—as the Bill passes through its stages? The Joint

Committee’s report found that the Law Commission was better placed to give detailed

scrutiny to this kind of allegedly obsolete statute. We stated:

“The skills, research and consultation needed to ensure that Parliament, external

organisations and the public can be satisfied that a piece of legislation is genuinely obsolete

strongly suggest that the Law Commissions are better placed to conduct that work than

Government departments. Added to which, the independence of the Law Commissions from

Government and their track record since 1965 reinforce the trust that Parliament places in the

Law Commissions”.

This is a key point. Whom should we trust to say that legislation is obsolete and may be

safely repealed—government departments or the Law Commission? I am in no doubt that the

answer should be the Law Commissions. We recommended that Schedule 20 items be

referred to the Law Commission for a safety check. We acknowledged that, to meet the

growing demand, the Law Commission would need additional resource. We also agreed with

the Law Commission’s own proposals for more frequent and responsive SLR Bills. We

recommended that the Government consider making such Bills annual, as my noble friend

Lord Naseby said.

The Government did not sound very enthusiastic about any of this in their response. They

disagreed with our recommendation to give more resource to the Law Commissions—and did

not give a convincing reason why—and so the mass repeal proposed in Clause 81 and

33

Schedule 20 remains part of the Bill. I suspect that we will discuss that further as the Bill

progresses. The case for subjecting all those proposed repeals to the Law Commission for a

safety check remains very strong, as does the case for an annual SLR Bill.

However, there are other controversial matters in the Bill; I will point to just some of those

that were investigated by the Joint Committee. We were concerned about the level of

consultation undertaken by the Government in preparation for this very complex and wide-

ranging Bill. The original Bill had 61 relevant clauses in it, excluding recitations, titles and so

on. Only 10 of those clauses were subject to formal consultation, a further 18 had had some

kind of consultation under the Red Tape Challenge scheme, and the rest had no formal

consultation at all. That raised two questions: was that an appropriate level of consultation,

and was it appropriate to rely on the Red Tape Challenge as a means of consultation?

The Joint Committee concluded that in some cases consultation had been insufficient. We

were also alarmed by Oliver Letwin’s assertion that pre-legislative scrutiny was part of the

Government’s consultation process. It is not. The Government should not rely—as they

apparently were—on Parliament to consult on their behalf, but should undertake proper

consultation themselves. I wonder whether inclusion in the Red Tape Challenge amounts to

proper consultation. It is not clear that it should, and I would be interested to hear the

Minister speak to the robustness of the Red Tape Challenge process. In the event, the

Government agreed to remove certain clauses pending further consultation and, in particular,

to consult further—which is important—on the authorisation of insolvency practitioners.

The committee welcomed the Government’s reasons, when it came to it, for proposing a duty

on regulators to have regard in broad terms to “economic growth”. We discussed at some

length with our witnesses and among ourselves the question of measuring or judging the

success of that requirement. That was an important consideration; we need to be able to

assess the effect of any piece of legislation. However, we acknowledged that with the growth

objective, that would be difficult. We understood the difficulties involved in attempts to

quantify. Nevertheless, we thought that the Government should consider by what criteria the

impact of the duty could be demonstrated, and welcomed the Minister’s commitment to

reflect further. I am not sure that the further reflection—if that is what it was—in the

Government’s response to our report was terribly helpful. It was all rather vague and woolly.

That is an important and unresolved issue, to which I expect to return at a later stage.

Also unresolved is the consequence of the application of the growth duty to the EHRC. The

commission spoke to us about the,

“intrinsic incompatibility between the growth duty and the duty to promote and protect

human rights”.

That incompatibility would risk the “A” status of the commission and the British candidacy

on the UN Human Rights Council. The JCHR agreed with this assessment. In their response

to our report the Government recognised the need to avoid jeopardising the international

standing of the EHRC. They said that they would consider this issue further with the EHRC

before finalising the list of regulators to whom the growth duty will apply. In the helpful draft

guidance notes I received from the Minister this morning, there was no list and no mention of

the issue in the covering letter. Can the Minister tell the House what progress is being made

in discussion of whether that growth duty will apply to the EHRC?

34

There are also some other committee recommendations where the Government response

seems to require further discussion. I refer in particular to Clause 2, which removes the

employment tribunal’s power to make wider recommendations, to Clause 43, which deals

with household waste decriminalisation, and to Clause 70, which deals with gangmasters. I

am sure that the list of clauses your Lordships will want to discuss in detail will be much

longer than that, and I look forward to those discussions.

The purpose of the Bill is a very good one. It is a very welcome Bill and contains good

things. The provisions for apprenticeships and their funding in Clauses 3, 4 and 5 are

especially welcome, as is the whole part on “Alcohol and entertainment”. This grew from one

rather lonely clause in the draft Bill on the exhibition of films in community premises to the

larger-scale liberalisation for local community events.

That part also contains, in Clauses 59 and 60, provisions for review of the penalties for non-

payment of the BBC licence fee and powers to decriminalise such non-payment. I welcome

the opportunity that gives us to discuss how to balance protection of the BBC’s revenue with

the importance of not sending people to prison for non-payment of the licence fee. However,

I would have welcomed it even more had we been discussing this in the context of charter

renewal.

Finally, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for his outstanding chairmanship of our Joint

Committee. I would like to thank our truly excellent clerks, Christine Salmon Percival and

Geraldine Alexander, for their invaluable work.

5.30 pm

Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab):

My Lords, as we have heard in this debate, everyone agrees it is right to remove

unnecessary regulatory and legislative burdens from individuals, civil society,

businesses and public sector organisations. However, this hotchpotch of measures is not

proportionate in some areas and will not promote growth or jobs. There are two specific

areas of the Bill that I want to focus on in my contribution today, both of which, if

carried, will put at risk workers’ and consumers’ safety. These relate to the clauses on

health and safety and the last-minute proposals thrown in at the end of the Committee

stage in the other place on taxis and private hire vehicles.

Regulations that protect the health and safety of workers are not red tape: ask the many

people injured in the construction industry or the families of those killed. Nor are the

regulations that help women decide on the safest way home or to work red tape. The health

and safety proposals will have a negligible impact on self-employed people but will create

confusion, as we have heard in the debate, where there has been clarity for the past 40 years.

At best, the Government believe this clause may save self-employed people 37p each per

year. As the Minister said, the Health and Safety Executive has only today published a

consultation on the list of self-employed people who will continue to be covered by the

Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. It is 60 pages long, so I have not been through it

thoroughly, but it is beyond me how any self-employed joiner is expected to know whether

they are involved in,

35

“construction work (within the meaning given in regulation 2(1) of the Construction (Design

and Management) Regulation 2007)”.

The same is true of most others. It is a recipe for confusion and the only people who will

benefit will be consultants and possibly undertakers.

The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health are also worried that this exemption could

cause growth in bogus self-employment and poor health and safety standards—a problem

highlighted so well by my noble friend Lady Donaghy’s report in 2009. The institution

believes the current requirements for the self-employed are not onerous and make good

business sense. Exemption would give the wrong message and may encourage the

unscrupulous to gamble with people’s safety and health.

Turning to the other area, taxis and minicabs are not just for the well-off. At certain

parts of the day they are the only form of public transport available. For elderly and

disabled people taxis and minicabs are often their only option throughout the day.

Safety organisations, police and crime commissioners, licensing officers, councils and

industry bodies warn that the Government’s proposed reforms will have severe safety

implications. People without a minicab licence will be allowed to drive one when it is

“off duty”, threatening to put vulnerable passengers, such as women, at increased risk

of rogue minicab drivers. Mandatory annual licence checks, which help councils ensure

drivers are fit and proper, will end. Minicab operators will be allowed to subcontract

bookings to firms in other areas, meaning that someone getting into a minicab cannot be

sure it is from the firm they booked with. Ask a person with disabilities whether that is

right.

The Government cannot rely completely on the Law Commission for this regulation. Its

final report, published in May, recommended significant new enforcement powers and

safeguards for local authorities in conjunction with these measures. As my noble friend

Lord Stevenson said, local licensing officers do not have the powers to ensure these

changes can be enforced safety.

Ministers in the other place said these measures work in London but Transport for

London and the Metropolitan Police work together for on-street enforcement in the

capital, which has significant problems with unlicensed operators. Between 200 and 250

cases of sexual assault concerning unlicensed minicabs are reported across London

every year. It is conservatively estimated that five times that number go unreported.

The recent protests we have seen outside the House over Uber and the questions it raises

on the impact of new technologies on the trade underline why the Government’s

piecemeal reforms will not work. We need to consider regulation and enforcement of

the licensed taxi and private hire trades comprehensively. These piecemeal measures

are wrong. Deregulation will have wider consequences, including for people with

disabilities’ access to taxis and minicabs, and the production of black cabs, which is still

an important part of the UK automotive sector.

The Government need to stop and listen. Listen to the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which

campaigns for better personal safety and expressed concerns that enabling anyone to

drive a licensed minicab will provide,

“greater opportunity for those intent on preying on women”.

36

Listen to the Local Government Association, which says that,

“it is imperative that the Government withdraws these plans”,

to ensure passenger safety. Listen to the group of 15 cross-party police and crime

commissioners from across the United Kingdom who have written to the Government to

oppose these measures. If Ministers continue to refuse to listen, I am confident from

listening to the contributions in today’s debate that noble Lords across this House will

stand up for the travelling public and refuse to endorse the Government’s rushed and

risky proposals.

5.38 pm

The Earl of Lytton (CB):

My Lords, I am afraid I have a fistful of declarations of interest to make, not only as a vice-

president of the LGA, but as a landowner, a member of the CLA, a landlord, a practising

chartered surveyor, chairman of the Rights of Way Review Committee and, of course, due to

my involvement with parish and town councils. I am afraid I do not speak for any of those

other interests.

Much of the Bill is welcome. Anything that calls itself deregulation is a start—in particular, I

briefly point to the issues of dealing with short-term lets and the health and safety of self-

employed trades—always provided it produces net reductions in burdens and does not just

shift them around or create other problems in their wake. I am sure other noble Lords will

relate to that.

I wish to follow the example of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and refer to Clauses 21 to 27 on

the matter of rights of way. I agree that they represent the essence of what the stakeholders

working group agreed to. I particularly pay tribute to the way the disparate interests involved

with that sought to find common ground. I think that should be applauded. However, it had

quite a narrow remit, and many issues of current management and usage of the rights of way

system remain unaddressed. I hope that the Minister will confirm that these remain in focus

and that the Bill, when it has been ticked off, does not just become a means for ignoring the

ongoing need to do something.

I think we all agree that the rights of way system in this country is a thing of glory and great

value culturally, economically and socially. It more than merits better treatment, with an

even-handed and objective approach as befits a national treasure. At present, it is deprived of

resources, a primary cause of the delays in recording historic rights and of procuring

necessary change along the way. This risks leaving many stakeholders inherently dissatisfied,

if not irate, and the current day-to-day management and administration suffers.

Therefore, I hope that we will not settle the issue of unrecorded rights of way after 2026 only

to open up, as we approach that date, some other area of contention that we have not thought

of. The Bill deals with some aspects but not with others. I hope that the Minister can reassure

me about the intentions for the rest, as I have said. I accept that the rights of way network is

very large and often incoherent. Its statutory basis is complex and the coalition inherits a

legacy of many past Administrations doing too little or nothing, with occasionally some

expensive and ill-targeted legislation on the way.

37

I am a landowner within the Exmoor National Park. I know how useful it is to both users and

landowners to have a focused, resourced and authoritative body such as a national park

authority to deal with issues of network coherence and management. Such bodies have

proved effective in defusing negativity and removing obstructive stances by just process,

expertise and reasoned dialogue. We need more of that.

Therefore, the key to all this is resources for rights of way, which outside of national parks, as

I have suggested, have been decimated. If that deepened voluntary dialogue between

stakeholders, I would welcome that as a slightly back-handed compliment. The

administrative machinery that underpins any necessary change is essential, and access to the

countryside on urban fringes is no less important than access across rural broads or remote

uplands or along the coast.

Despite the limited claims of the Bill, which I support, I hope that the Minister will confirm

that the Government are apprised of the hugely beneficial opportunities offered by investment

in a national rights of way system, not least its eventual rationalisation, making it fit for the

21st century and less of a bone of contention.

Deregulation Bill

Second Reading (Continued)

6.28 pm

Lord Brabazon of Tara (Con):

My Lords, returning to the Deregulation Bill, I dare say that not every noble Lord will wish

to hear my speech. I do not blame them. I will leave a moment or two for the House to settle

down.

This Bill has been described by the Minister as a wide-ranging measure. Other noble Lords

have described it as a Christmas tree. I have heard most of the speeches on the Bill so far and

they have ranged over a very large number of topics. However, there is one little gem hidden

away in the Bill on page 203—out of 204 pages. Paragraph 40 of Schedule 20 states:

“Omit section 13 of the Defamation Act 1996”.

I had the honour to chair the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, which reported a

year or so ago. One of our recommendations in paragraph 170 was,

“the repeal of section 13 of the Defamation Act 1996. The anomalies it creates are more

damaging than the mischief it was intended to cure. There is no persuasive argument for

granting either House a power of waiver or for restricting such a power to defamation cases

alone. A wider power of waiver would create uncertainty, and have the potential to

undermine the fundamental constitutional principle of freedom of speech in Parliament”.

The Government told us:

38

“There are clearly problems with Section 13 of the Defamation Act. It is at odds with the

principle that freedom of speech is a privilege of the House, not just individual members and

it can create an imbalance where one party to proceedings can choose to use the

parliamentary record but the other cannot”.

The Government went on to say:

“However, the Government is not aware of any instances in which anyone has used the power

of waiver and as such it would not appear to be a pressing priority to repeal Section 13”.

However, I am very pleased that three of my Commons colleagues managed to table an

amendment to put this into the Bill. It was accepted—indeed, I think the Government added

their name to it—and is therefore now in the Bill.

I do not suppose that a great number of your Lordships have actually got as far as paragraph

40 of Schedule 20—perhaps I should not say that—although I did hear that the noble Lord,

Lord Stevenson, at least got to the preceding paragraph about dog collars, so he must have

jolly nearly got there anyway, on which I congratulate him.

Anyway, the amendment was successful and is now part of the Bill. I congratulate the

Government on that and I hope the Bill will get a smooth passage through its remaining

stages.

6.31 pm

Baroness Thornton (Lab):

My Lords, this is even more of a pot pourri of a Bill than the previous regulatory Bill in

which I participated in your Lordships’ House. However, there are some continuing themes

concerning equalities, a lack of thought about people who need to be considered because of

their vulnerabilities, and the fact that regulation is often the way in which public bodies and

businesses ensure that protection and fairness.

I will be speaking about three matters. Clauses 83 to 86 concern regulators having

regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth. Clause 2 concerns tribunals’

power to make wider recommendations in discrimination cases—I think we have been

here before. I will be looking at Clauses 10 to 12, as other noble Lords have, concerning

the safety of vulnerable groups in the taxi licensing regime; I will not stray into the

detail of licensing. Finally, I wish to speak about clauses that are not yet in the Bill but

which I hope the Government might bring forward in their own amendments, which

would assist the growth and development of co-operative schools.

I will speak about co-operative schools first. Given that the Bill is supposed to be about

removing barriers and creating a level playing field for enterprises, and that this Government

are to be commended for their support for co-operatives and mutuals, I suggest that this

matter is absolutely at the heart of that support. I am aware that the Government have been

holding discussions about amendments on this matter and I hope that we might see a positive

outcome.

39

The matter concerns adding two additional clauses to the Bill. The first would remove a

clause from the Education and Inspections Act 2006 which is a barrier to enabling nursery

schools to become full members of trusts—or, indeed, academies. This would help to provide

a vehicle for parental and family engagement in early years. The second would amend the

School Organisation (Requirements as to Foundations) (England) Regulations 2007, to

ensure that schools are able to establish themselves as industrial and provident societies,

should it be desirable, and bringing co-operative schools in line with other types of co-

operative organisations.

Despite an all-party commitment to co-operatives and mutuals in the public sector, co-

operative schools have had to work around existing legislation because no provision is made

in the relevant Education Acts for schools to be established as industrial and provident

societies as currently defined in the 1965 Act. My proposed new clause seeks to amend this

and ensure that any future legislation provides a level playing field and a more

understandable legal framework. I hope the Minister will agree that these new clauses would

be a good addition to his Bill.

Clauses 83 provides that while exercising their regulatory function, regulators must,

“have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth”,

and must,

“in particular, consider the importance for the promotion of economic growth”,

of ensuring that any regulatory action they take is necessary and proportionate. At Second

Reading, Oliver Letwin, the Minister for Government Policy, described this as,

“probably the single most important clause in the Bill”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/2/14;

col. 37.]

We need to pay it particular attention, I suggest. Clause 84 would enable a Minister to specify

in a statutory instrument which regulatory functions would be subject to this duty; in some

cases it might not apply to all the regulator’s functions. Clause 85 would give power for a

Minister to issue guidance on how,

“regulatory functions may be exercised so as to promote economic growth”,

and how regulators subject to the duty could demonstrate that they were complying with it.

Regulators subject to the economic growth duty would have a duty to regard any guidance.

We saw the draft guidance an hour or so before the debate started, and I will return to that in

a moment.

I understand that the background to these provisions is the post-implementation review of the

Regulators’ Compliance Code, and the independent report of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine,

No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth, which recommended that the Government should

impose such an obligation on regulators,

“to take proper account of the economic consequences of their actions”.

40

The Government ran a consultation on this in 2013, which maintained that a growth duty

would,

“enable regulators to respond more comprehensively to the challenge of stripping back

burdens to the minimum necessary and proactively supporting growth”.

The Government stated that,

“the duty needs to be imposed via primary legislation to provide the legal foundation

needed”.

On these Benches, we share the concerns that have been expressed by the Joint Committee

chaired by my noble friend Lord Rooker, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the

Equality and Human Rights Commission, which have consistently expressed concerns about

the implications of applying the economic growth duty to the EHRC. The Joint Committee

believed that the duty in Clause 85 to have regard to ministerial guidance,

“raises serious questions about the EHRC’s independence”,

because of the implications of the proposed growth duty for the UK’s compliance with the

United Nations’ Paris principles if the duty applies to national human rights institutions such

as the EHRC. They are supposed to be independent organisations which decide which human

rights and equalities issues to address. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said:

“Applying the economic growth duty to the EHRC poses a significant risk to the EHRC’s

independence”,

and that this should not be pursued in the way that the Government are doing.

The chair of the EHRC, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve, was asked whether

applying the growth duty to the EHRC might undermine the Paris principles on the

independence of the commission. She said:

“We have tended to agree with this Committee that, prima facie, it would indeed threaten the

A-status”,

of the EHRC as an international equality and human rights body. She continued:

“Therefore, it would be proposed that we come under the duty with respect to very specific

functions. The debate between us and government at this stage is over how specific it would

have to be and whether it is worth the candle when you get to that degree of specificity”.

I think she is probably correct.

I looked at the draft guidance that we received before the debate to see if I could find some

comfort from it. Actually, I think it created more smoke than elucidation. What we have to do

in Committee—as I intend to—is consider what might happen were this duty to be applied

under particular circumstances. So we need to look at, for example, maternity leave where

companies have been found wanting and the cost of putting that right, and whether that could

be balanced against the economic growth duty.

41

I will be seeking, as I think other noble Lords will, to look at the proposal to remove the

power of employment tribunals under the Equality Act to make wider recommendations in

discrimination cases. This is an important power. It is not one that we should throw away.

Most companies, when they lose, apply the tribunal’s recommendations to all their

employees, but not all do. Surely those employees deserve the same protection as others, so

we will be seeking to remove that from the Bill. We will also be asking the Government what

the evidence is that this needs to be done because we do not think that the evidence is there

any more than it was the first time the Government tried to do this.

Finally, on taxi licensing, we oppose the Government’s proposal to reform taxi minicab

law because it will put passengers at risk. My honourable friends in the Commons

opposed this when it was inserted late in the Committee stage. We believe that these

targets to cut red tape are rushed and risky, poorly drafted and badly consulted on.

Where they have been consulted on, safety organisations, the police and industry bodies

are warning that the Government’s proposed reforms could have very severe safety

implications. These include the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which campaigns for better

personal safety and has raised concerns that enabling anyone to drive a licensed

minicab will provide greater opportunities for those who are intent on preying on

women.

6.40 pm

Lord Bew (CB):

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, I praise the golden words to be found in

paragraph 40 of Schedule 20 to the Bill:

“Omit section 13 of the Defamation Act 1996 (which allows an individual litigant in

defamation cases to waive the ban in Article IX of the Bill of Rights on proceedings in

Parliament being impeached or questioned in court)”.

As the noble Lord said, this was the view of the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege,

which he chaired so ably. We are very much indebted to the members of that committee in

another place who pushed this matter forward so skilfully, but it was the view not only of our

committee, but of the committee chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Nicholls of

Birkenhead, in 1999. What it does is effectively to resolve the ambiguities created by the Neil

Hamilton case of 1996. We are indebted to the Government for finally grasping this nettle

and I offer my support to this part of the Bill.

However I register a caveat. In the debate occasioned by the Second Reading of the proposed

legislation of the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, on this topic on 27 June, the noble

and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, made an important point. I also pay tribute to the noble

Lord, Lord Lester, who has played a major role in bringing about the change envisaged in the

Bill. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, made a point that must be

reflected on, even by those who are extremely enthusiastically in favour of this change, when

he said that,

“the question is whether it is right that a Member of Parliament can be defamed by people in

respect of something that he or she has said or done in Parliament and that, if that happens, he

or she has no remedy”.—[Official Report, 27/6/2014; col. 1522.]

42

There is a problem here. In my view, the balance is right. The principle of parliamentary

privilege cannot be, as it were, individualised. That was the problem with the situation we

had from 1996 to the present. It must be placed at the level of Parliament as a whole if it is to

be understood and respected by the public. None the less, a difficulty is created. I draw the

parties’ attention to the duty of care that they will have, particularly to new Members, in the

next Parliament. It is related also to another piece of legislation, which is in the Queen’s

Speech, for recall. In both these cases, if they get it wrong the consequences for a new MP

could be really dramatic. That is the way we are going.

There is a sense that Parliament understands that the public expects higher standards from

Members of Parliament than they do from other public servants and Parliament is trying,

through these measures, to address public concerns about honesty in our public life. The

impulse that is leading Parliament to act in this way is entirely reasonable, but it does mean

that Parliament has a duty to ensure that new Members understand the ways in which

legislation is changing. There are vulnerabilities now that did not exist in the past and prices

to be paid if we get these things wrong.

It is perfectly reasonable to argue that IPSA has effectively resolved the issue of expenses—

that the recent issues have been historical ones that go back to before the time of the new

IPSA regime. However, anybody who believes that issues around lobbying, or even cash for

questions, have disappeared and are issues of the 1990s simply has not been reading the

newspapers in the past three or four years. Therefore, it is all the more important that the

induction programme for new MPs should help with these questions.

At the beginning of the previous Parliament, the Hansard Society put on an induction

programme that was poorly attended. The ethics section was particularly poorly attended. The

parties must have a major role here. They should encourage new Members in the new

Parliament, explain where public opinion is and explain the ways in which legislation is

changing. They should also explain, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, pointed out

on Friday 27 June in this Chamber, that Members now have a vulnerability they did not have

before: they do not have the protection that they previously had over what they say in the

Chamber. These are important matters and it is the responsibility of Parliament, and

particularly the responsibility of the parties, to take them on board.

I welcome this new legislation. It is absolutely correct in principle but there is a caveat: there

is a responsibility on the political parties that are pushing the legislation through to make sure

that newly elected Members know exactly where they stand and where the law now stands. It

is not, in this matter, where it has stood since 1996.

6.46 pm

Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab):

My Lords, I speak from the Back Benches because we have two excellent Front-Benchers

who are concerned with the Bill. I find that my usual blissful state of either opening on

legislation or winding up has now been reduced to a middle position in the debate, where

everything I want to say has already been said and, if I make a mistake, there are enough

people behind me to call me out. So it is with a degree of nervousness that I make a few short

comments on the Bill.

43

We have serious reservations about the three main transport areas of the Bill. Those

concerned with the regulation of taxis and minicabs, particularly the deregulation of

minicabs, which my noble friend Lady Thornton identified a moment ago, raise serious

risks for the public. We should recognise that people, particularly women, book

minicabs for the security of the service being offered. That is being blown apart by the

Bill. The cab firm could pass on the telephone call and engage another company. The

person who has booked the cab will not have that surety, and it has the potential to let

rogue drivers exploit the looseness in the Bill. There have been a few examples in recent

years of dreadful things being carried out in cabs.

The Bill needs to be amended in that area. We should recognise that the black cab trade

is worried about this situation. It is always worried about minicab competition and so it

should be—minicab competition has the right to present a challenge—but we know that

new technology, such as the Uber technology that is a source of great concern at

present, is creating a situation whereby anybody can call a minicab at any time and

minicabs will not suffer from the restrictions forced on them in the past. The black cab

trade is central to safe, secure and proper transport in some of our cities, particularly

London, and is admired all over the world, in all the world’s great cities. We should

take threats to that seriously.

The second area we are concerned about is the banning of CCTV for parking enforcement. I

have great sympathy with the Government in seeking to tackle a problem whereby the citizen

receives a fine through the post, not having been aware that a charge has been laid, to which

they have to make immediate return. We do not seem to have tackled this issue thoroughly or

properly. On 10 June, the Government said that they had not reached a decision; on 17 June

an amendment was made to the Bill in other place and was immediately translated into the

Bill by a government majority.

There are real risks to road safety. There are risks at schools. There are risks in bus lanes,

where drivers will chance it if they think they will not be surveyed. There are risks at bus

stops. There are risks at yellow boxes on junctions. They are a good idea and have eased

congestion, but a good idea is destroyed if one driver chances it and sits in that box and

blocks the traffic. If the Government are open to persuasion that there should be exemptions

to ending closed circuit TV prosecutions in these areas, those exemptions should be in the

Bill and we will seek to achieve that.

The measure in the Bill on maritime accident investigation seems to us a miserable and mean

little gesture on the part of the Government. The House will know that the most significant

case in recent years involved the MV “Derbyshire”, which was lost in the South China Sea a

few years ago with everybody on board—all 42 crew and two wives travelling—lost. There

was always the suggestion, while nothing could be proved, that somebody had blundered and

that the accident had occurred because seamanship was deficient. When the wreck was

eventually identified, it became clear that the circumstances in which the vessel went down

were nothing to do with error on the part of the crew or with their seamanship. The case was

reopened thanks to great efforts by my noble friend Lord Prescott, who was Minister at the

time and who had a long history with the seamen, and great pressure from the National Union

of Seamen, which, together with international forces that came in to help, funded a great deal

of the investigation. It is now suggested in the Bill that the Secretary of State should not be

bothered to reopen such investigations except in specific circumstances.

44

Sea accidents are such that we should treat them with the greatest seriousness. We surely

cannot have a Bill in which they are taken lightly. My noble friend Lord Rooker, in his

excellent speech, identified this issue as one that did not add to the quality of the Bill. At least

I have kept to time.

6.53 pm

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con):

My Lords, I was very pleased that, in introducing the Bill, the Minister reminded us that one

of its main purposes was to create jobs and enterprise. That was echoed by the noble Lord,

Lord Stevenson, who hoped that the Bill would stimulate the economy. My noble friend Lord

Fowler told us quite rightly that it was important that restrictions and regulations that were

brought in some time ago to meet the circumstances of the time should be looked at again, as

the world has changed. That brings me neatly to the one point that I want to make today,

which is about Sunday trading.

It is now 20 years since the Sunday Trading Act became law and, of course, the world has

changed considerably since then. Sundays are now a huge family day, with great sporting

events—people go to football in a way that never happened on such a scale previously—

concerts and cultural activities. It is a fantastic opportunity for families to get together. The

Government recognised this two years ago during the Olympics. They recognised that, in the

new world, the current restrictions were not appropriate, so they relaxed the Sunday trading

laws for eight consecutive weekends. They knew that people and their families wanted to

shop at a time of their choosing and not at a time laid down by officialdom and red tape.

Sunday trading was mentioned in passing by the noble Lord, Lord Monks, who is not in his

place. I say to him that there has been one other major development in today’s world, which

is the number of people who work right through the week on different days and at strange

hours. They do so because they want to meet the needs of their customers. In particular, there

are those in the public sector, the public servants on whom we all rely, who have to provide

24/7 service to their customers, patients and so on. Should not those public servants be on the

receiving end of similar flexibility on a Sunday as well?

There has been another change since the Act came in 20 years ago, which is 24-hour online

shopping. I think that younger people find the idea very quaint that people should not be

allowed to shop between certain hours on a Sunday.

Under the current law, shops of more than 3,000 square feet can open only for restricted

hours on a Sunday. Smaller shops do not have restricted hours. As a result, the big

supermarket chains have been opening their own small stores of less than 3,000 square feet

and then charging in them significantly more than in their larger supermarkets. Surveys show

that, in some of these supermarket “mini” or “local” stores, prices are on average 10% higher.

Customers rightly see that as something of a rip-off.

Lord Rooker:

The noble Lord gives an excellent example. About six months ago, I did a shopping survey in

the town where I live, Ludlow. I bought identical products in One Stop, which does not label

itself as Tesco but is wholly owned by it, and in the Tesco supermarket in the town. All the

products went to the food bank afterwards. The noble Lord is absolutely right: there is a 10%

45

difference in price. A small store can open from 6 am to 11 pm because it is not governed by

the Sunday trading laws, but there is definitely a premium to be paid in those small stores

owned by the supermarkets.

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury:

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that comment, which is reinforced by surveys that show

exactly the same thing: prices are on average 10% higher. That is a rip-off in my view.

An anomaly in the current law is the way in which garden centres have been caught up in

these restrictions—I do not think that that was ever the intention—because their products are

spread over a larger area than 3,000 square feet. Garden centres are a big part of family

outings.

I am not asking the Minister for much. This is a very large Bill, with more than 200 pages, so

I am sure that it would not be impossible for him to add perhaps one extra page.

6.59 pm

Lord Hussain (LD):

My Lords, I want to address the provisions relating to taxis and private hire vehicles.

We choose to use taxi operators that we trust. If I ask my children to use a taxi at an

odd time, I tell them which taxi rank to use, because that is the one that I have

confidence in and which I trust. The proposal to allow taxis to subcontract to other

operators will mean that it will not be possible for anybody to have their choice. We are

going to take the choice away from people about which operator they want to use. We

change operators from time to time when we are not satisfied with a particular

company, but if this Bill is approved, we will have no control over who will come. It may

well be a company that you have left because you were not satisfied with it. If you ring

company A, company B may turn up, and you may not necessarily want to use it.

Therefore, we need to think again about this particular aspect of the Bill allowing

subcontracting to other firms.

Regarding the provision allowing a driver without a PHV licence to drive a licensed

PHV when it is not being used for private hire, I know many people in the taxi trade.

Many of my family are in the trade and I know that by allowing taxis to be used by

others, some of them may benefit. In some cases, spouses may want to use the car when

it is not being used for taxiing purposes, but they cannot at the moment because the law

does not allow them to do so. In that case, it would be helpful to allow other family

members to use those vehicles for other purposes—for family purposes—when they are

off duty.

However, I have been strongly lobbied by many companies and unions, particularly

Unite, GMB and RMT, which have put some valid points forward. There is a higher

risk that those cars could be used as taxis by rogue drivers. They could be made

available to those who are not necessarily taxi drivers and have not taken their tests. By

allowing this to happen, we could compromise public safety. However, it may well help

if we allowed named drivers to use those vehicles instead of any driver. In that case, at

least we would know that the people who use those vehicles will be known to family

members. Therefore, I hope that the Minister will give some consideration to this and

46

perhaps have named drivers, instead of any person, driving those vehicles when they

are not being used for taxiing purposes.

7.04 pm

Baroness Turner of Camden (Lab):

My Lords, this is an extraordinary Bill, covering almost every aspect of life. I shall

concentrate on aspects of particular concern to me. Others have done the same and I am

interested to hear what they say. Why do we have regulation? Surely it is because we live in a

competitive environment and need to protect the interests of others who would otherwise risk

being damaged. If we change the regulations, we have to be very careful that in so doing we

do not damage other people who would otherwise be vulnerable.

As we know, the Bill begins with a clause on health and safety at work. It proposes to include

a general duty on the self-employed to others involved in the undertaking, but not particularly

to employees. There is a reference to the construction industry, in which quite a number of

self-employed people are involved, but I am more concerned about the general duty to

employees as a whole. In the last Session, the Government introduced a change to the

legislation, making it more difficult for employees to sue for compensation in the event of

injury—or even death—at work. In this House, we opposed that change, but the Government

defeated our amendment in the House of Commons. What is proposed in this Bill does not

assist ordinary employees very much, although it may be relevant to self-employment, but in

Committee we will have to return once again to the issue of ordinary employees who are still

at risk, as far as certain undertakings are concerned.

We then have a reference to employment tribunals: a change to the Equality Act so that a

tribunal will not be able to make recommendations wider than the actual case under decision.

Like other noble Lords, I do not see why this is necessary. No reason at all has been given for

this change and it should be opposed in Committee. I certainly intend to do so.

Clauses 3 and 4 relate to English apprenticeships. It is said that the funding proposals will

encourage individuals to do approved English apprenticeships or to work afterwards. I hope

that this is so and that there are arrangements for suitable funding. This is extremely

important. It is an aspect that, again, we should look at in more detail when it is before us in

Committee.

There is then a list of recommendations dealing with taxis and private car hire. As

someone who uses car hire frequently because of disability, I am interested in ensuring

that the drivers are safe and mostly good in their driving—and they seem to be. Driving

in London is crowded and often expensive and the Bill will obviously make no

difference to that, but is it really a good idea to allow people who are not licensed to

drive private hire cars? I do not think so and neither do a number of noble Lords who

have already spoken in the debate. It was noted that women could be at risk,

particularly going home late at night. I hope that this is something that shall look at

with great scrutiny in Committee.

The Bill refers to housing, in particular what is known as the right to buy. A clause reduces

the qualifying period for people who wish to buy their social housing from five to three years.

There is no doubt that this provision was popular with many people, who were thus able to

47

acquire property that they would not have been able to afford on the private market.

However, many of us were critical at the time, because no replacement was made of the

social housing that disappeared as a result of the right to buy. It therefore does not seem right

in the present circumstances to make it easier for people to buy local authority housing when

there is still such a shortage of social housing. I think that everybody agrees that there is a

terrible shortage of social housing and there should be concentration on that.

As far as the final schedule, Schedule 20, is concerned, there is a set of proposals for

legislation to be removed. It is proposed that legislation that is no longer of practical use

should be removed. That includes legislation on formerly nationalised industries that have

been privatised. Obviously, legislation is no longer required for such industries, especially

ones such as mining and steel.

There was a TV programme recently, “Benefits Britain”, dealing with areas where, once,

steel provided employment for the whole community—no longer. The people were feeling

hopeless, left without employment. The Bill has nothing to say about that. There is a

reference earlier in the Bill to a sustainable community strategy to be undertaken by local

authorities, but the Bill does not recommend that that should continue. It is clearly necessary

that there should be some development to provide alternative work in areas that have been

rendered into that situation, providing no employment and no support for the local people.

There are a number of other issues in the Bill to which I shall not refer because many noble

Lords have dealt with them this afternoon. It is clear that a number of issues are matters for

further scrutiny and could be rendered more acceptable to some of us if they were amended.

We will pursue that when the Bill is before us in Committee.

7.11 pm

Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con):

My Lords, by my calculation, I am the 25th cab on the rank today—licensed or unlicensed, I

am not sure.

The Bill is indeed a weighty tome, a very heavy volume. In a previous life, I might have been

tempted to put it on one side and wait for the film, but even if it is made at Pinewood, I do not

think that would be appropriate.

I should like to refer to two or three matters. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, referred to Clause

34, about short-term use of London accommodation. This being a deregulation Bill, that

caught my eye because I was trying to understand why London was separate from the rest of

the country in respect of legislation of this kind, whether this was regulation or deregulation,

and whether there are homogeneous rules across all London boroughs. That is a source of

great confusion to me in a deregulation Bill. It would be very interesting to know, at a time

when housing is in such short supply, particularly in Greater London, whether there is cause

for reregulation of some kind and why we cannot just be consistent with the rest of the home

nations.

The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, with whom I have had many an agreeable conversation over the

years on matters of broadcasting, raised the issue of Section 73 of the Copyright Act 1988.

That is not in the Bill. The noble Lord eloquently described the anomaly that it has created.

48

Opportunities in the legislative timetable of Parliament to put right things that have gone

horribly wrong are very rare, and this is one of those things, at a time when the creative

industries in this country are so important to economic growth. The Bill is about growth. The

growth of investment in British television product is leaking a lot of value as a result of the

1988 Act, which was designed to create greater competition in the fledgling cable market.

The cable market is hardly fledgling now; it is dwarfing the public service broadcasters in

this country. It has attracted Liberty, one of the world’s biggest media companies, to own

Virgin Media in this country. It appears that the commercial public service broadcasters are

now leaking value as a result of Section 73, and this is absolutely the appropriate time in the

parliamentary timetable to redress that and ensure that funds are flowing into British

production, as they should. I look forward to participating in debates on amendments to that

effect.

Clauses 59 and 60 relate to the BBC. I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Fowler is not in

his place, but it is probably just as well, because an argument about the BBC Trust would

detain your Lordships far too long, and we can take that offline. As my headmaster used to

say, “See me afterwards”.

It is of course right that the Government should consult and consider whether it is possible to

decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee. However, Clause 60 seems to anticipate charter

review—a point made by many noble Lords—which is worrying. We do not know what the

funding future of the BBC will be, we do not know what the governance structure will be,

and so on: that is all part of a process to come immediately after the election, if it has not

started already.

Also, the power of the Secretary of State in Clause 60 could in unscrupulous hands be used in

future as a stick to beat the BBC and, perhaps, challenge its independence or even threaten it.

I am not saying that the present Secretary of State would have any such thoughts, but it is a

worrying trend. I hope that the BBC clauses will get a good debate. I hope that we can get

reassurance from my noble friends on the Front Bench that implementation will await the

outcome of charter review. It makes no sense at all to put the cart before the horse.

In summary, as I said, I am hugely supportive of a deregulation Bill of this weight. As your

Lordships will know, this House is a repository of some of the greatest expertise in the land

on a million different subjects. They are all contained in the Bill, and I wish those on our

Front Bench all the very best in steering it through.

7.16 pm

Lord Whitty (Lab):

My Lords, I think I start from that point. I have a whole range of comments on the Bill, which

start with Clause 1, relating to the self-employed being excluded from health and safety

duties, and end on page 202. As a vice-president of the LGA, I know that one of its anxieties

has been about the provisions on the breeding of dogs on the last but one page of the Bill.

However, as comments have been made on most of those points, I will start by being a bit

more general, philosophical and procedural. Although the Government do not exactly look

like Bourbons, they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The coalition started this

Parliament by bringing into this House a Public Bodies Bill which managed, in all parts of

49

the economy and society, to alienate large chunks of civic society. We had representations,

and the Government had to drop a major part of the Bill. Thanks to my noble friend Lord

Rooker and his committee, one of the worst parts of the original draft of this Bill has been

jettisoned this time, because we had pre-legislative scrutiny. Having a portmanteau Bill such

as this is exactly the wrong way to go about modernising our regulation.

I am in favour of better regulation; I am not necessarily in favour of deregulation. The best

way to deal with our legislative inheritance and what is needed for modern society is to take

each area of regulation, look at it every two or three years, and ask what is still relevant, what

is cost-effective, what is working, what is absolutely redundant and what is

counterproductive. Each area needs to be looked at as a consistent whole. The way not to do

it is for the Cabinet Office to write round to the rest of Whitehall saying, “Can we have 24

clauses that we need to delete so that we can get rid of them all in one Bill in the last Session

of this Parliament?”, but that seems to be what it has done.

The one area in which the Government have taken a more coherent, comprehensive approach

from full consultation is rights of way. I told the Minister that they were very sensible to do

that. I was the Minister who brought in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act; it was a

pretty torrid time in this House, I can tell you, with all sorts of different interests, but we have

a package which is largely agreed. I agree with other speakers that that may not be the end of

the story, and I warn the Minister that there will be attempts to unravel or add to it, but that is

the way we should approach each of those areas. Instead, we have piecemeal bits of

legislation that we are going to cross out. Some of them are utterly redundant, and I am

absolutely in favour of crossing them off the statute book—there are still bits in Norman

French that we ought to be deleting from the statute book. These need to go. We have a

process for doing that; we have a Law Commission, which is proposing how we get rid of

redundant statutory provision. It also, incidentally, has good ideas on how we consolidate

legislation. Having got that machine, somehow we never find enough parliamentary time to

implement its recommendations; the next Parliament needs to look at how we can do that

better.

There are some areas that I will comment on specifically but I think the Government and

future Governments have to reflect on the way we deal with this. The better regulation

approach—I see the noble Lord, Lord Curry, just coming in—was looking on behalf of the

whole of government at different areas. Rather than this piecemeal, portmanteau Bill, perhaps

we should have followed procedure a bit more closely. Having got that off my chest, I will

comment on one or two aspects of the Bill.

I follow my noble friend Lord Davies in relation to the transport provisions and, in particular,

CCTV. This is populism gone mad. If we cannot enforce parking restrictions, we not only

endanger the safety of road users and pedestrians but also provide no parking space for

motorists. If people can continue to park in restricted areas with impunity, there will be no

parking space for the vast majority. By adopting the Jeremy Clarkson interpretation of the

motorists’ interests, the Government have gone down exactly the wrong road. Just as the

taxi provisions are not in the interests of the users of taxis, these parking provisions are

not in the interests of the vast majority of motorists; our towns will get clogged up and

there will be more accidents.

On housing, the right to buy is perhaps the most obvious aspect of my general contention.

The right to buy has been hugely contentious. I do not oppose the principle of right to buy.

50

However, in the present housing crisis, it is very important that any exercise of the right to

buy is put in the context of what is available in social housing, and affordable housing

generally. We have one provision in relation to eligibility for right to buy. The right to buy

was very good for those people who would never be able to afford their own house or who

were too old to get a mortgage. That does not mean people who have been in social housing

for only three years. The right to buy is for people who have been tenants for a large

proportion of their life and deserve a chance to get on the housing ladder. At the same time—

tomorrow, I think—in the Moses Room we are dealing with the change in the right to buy

provisions relating to the discount. Therefore, we have two changes in different parts of the

House in relation to one subject that needs to be seen in a wider context. The right to buy

ought to be a local decision. The provision, eligibility and discounts for the right to buy are

not suitable for national legislation, but should address the housing market in the locality. In

any case, it is an example of something that needs to be seen in the round.

Clause 83 relates to putting another requirement on all non-economic regulators. Most

legislation on regulation over the past 15 years has inserted the provision on economic and

non-economic regulators that they should have regard to sustainable development. Quite

often the previous Government, in their initial years, were slightly resistant to that, but they

were persuaded by the sensible arguments of the Liberal Democrats by and large, to put those

provisions in. That meant one had to look after the economics, the environmental effect and

the social effect. Obviously the main focus for any individual regulator was one or other of

those three corners, but they all had regard to all three. This seems to have an override, even

for areas such as human rights and environmental controls that should not be overridden by

short-term economic considerations. There is a real danger in that.

The world and his wife will be agitated about various aspects of the Bill. Some of it—

probably most of it—is very sensible and I can support it. However, I wish the Government

would not go down this road. When one gets to almost the very final page, there is an

interesting provision relating to the deletion of offences by people who fly kites. I am in total

agreement with that because it is a grave inhibition on the work of the House.

7.25 pm

Lord Greenway (CB):

My Lords, I shall not be tempted to follow the noble Lords, Lord Davies of Oldham and Lord

Rooker, into discussing Clause 40 regarding marine accident investigations. We will have

plenty of time for that in Committee. I will confine my remarks to Clause 81, which seeks to

amend the Merchant Shipping Act 1995 in relation to the implementation of international

maritime conventions, which emerged from the International Maritime Organisation just

across the river on the Albert Embankment. Currently in this country these are implemented

through a mix of primary and secondary legislation. This has led to a very complex

regulatory system that is confusing, time consuming—statutory instruments can take just as

long as primary legislation to go through both Houses—and resource intensive. It also results

in delay that can often be to the detriment of British shipping. For instance, our ships can be

challenged during control inspections in foreign ports for not being up to scratch with the

latest convention when those changes have not been incorporated into UK law. Conversely,

we are not able to challenge foreign ships when they transgress in our own ports on the latest

changes for the very same reason.

51

The new clause will permit any change in maritime conventions to which the UK is a party to

be automatically incorporated into UK law by the use of dynamic ambulatory references. I

am not a lawyer—I am sure a lawyer would understand that—but it is very much a speeding-

up process. What are the advantages? First, it will simplify the whole process and level out

the playing field for both UK and international shipping. Secondly, it will remove the lengthy

process of having to issue a new statutory instrument every time a change is made to a

maritime convention, and it will do away with the risk of gold-plating legislation, something

that we are rather prone to in this country. Thirdly, it will improve the reputation of the UK

abroad, where we are deemed to be rather slow and out of date in adopting new international

maritime standards in law.

UK shipping was reinvigorated by the introduction of the tonnage tax in 2000. Since then, the

UK-owned fleet has increased almost threefold and the UK-registered fleet, albeit from a

very low base, by more than six times. Shipping is still important to this country. The

shipping, ports and maritime sectors between them contribute £31.7 billion to UK GDP and

support more than 500,000 jobs. Shipping is a highly competitive business and anything that

can be done to help, as in this instance with the new clause, is very much to be welcomed.

7.28 pm

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston (Lab):

My Lords, I hope to persuade the Government to consider an amendment to the Deregulation

Bill. I declare an interest having formerly worked in independent television for 30 years. Like

my noble friend Lord Dubs and the noble Lord, Lord Grade, who spoke earlier, my concern

is that the content of our public service broadcasters—BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel

Five—is increasingly being retransmitted without payment by cable and online streaming

companies. These companies package public service broadcasting content on their platforms

and can then place their own unregulated adverts around it. With personal video recorders

now encouraging the time-shifting of programmes, and capable of storing hundreds of hours

of high-quality drama, popular entertainment and, of course, sporting events, these personal

video recorders are major revenue drivers for pay-TV platforms.

The issue of retransmission is rising up the policy agenda worldwide. In the United States,

the steady decline of television advertising revenue is being offset by the income that

broadcasters get from retransmission revenue: $2.36 billion in 2012. That may explain why

US TV is increasingly producing so many successful drama series, while our advertising-

funded PSB channels struggle to maintain their output of quality popular programming, with

their share of advertising revenue in decline.

We can debate whether we still have the best TV in the world, but what is indisputable is that

sales of programmes and formats provide very valuable income for the UK’s creative sector.

ITV’s “Downton Abbey”, for instance, sells in 250 territories with an estimated 100 million

viewers in China alone. Reformatted, “Strictly Come Dancing” can be seen in 50 countries,

and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” in more than 100. However, in these times of

disruptive technologies and increasing commercial competition across the media, our public

service broadcasters should not be subsidising international media conglomerates such as

Liberty Global, which now owns Virgin Media.

52

Our PSBs do not get paid by those who retransmit their output because of the now redundant

Section 73 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. As the noble Lord, Lord Grade,

said, this legislation was originally intended to encourage the rollout of cable in the United

Kingdom—but the world has moved on in the past 26 years. We now have a highly

competitive pay-TV market in satellite, cable and, increasingly, online. Section 73, designed

to boost cable coverage by allowing retransmission of UK public service channels at no cost,

has now become the unintended loophole for commercial online platforms to stream PSB

programming without permission or payment. These companies do not reinvest their online

profits in the UK creative content that makes their services so attractive. Indeed, they divert

money from the UK production sector because of Section 73, which could be repealed by an

amendment to this Bill.

The personal video recorders—the so-called PVRs—used by customers on cable or online

platforms can store, as I said, hundreds of hours of PSB-produced drama or entertainment.

For instance, ITV’s “Downton Abbey” is time-shifted by almost half of cabled homes, using

their TiVo PVRs, but most viewers then fast forward through the recorded advertising breaks,

which means that ITV gets paid less by its advertisers. Given the importance the Government

attach to our creative industries, they should surely be more purposive towards the timely

removal of Section 73 in this fast-changing digital world.

They may be inhibited by ongoing litigation between PSBs and one of the many online

streaming services, which has been going on for some four years already, as my noble friend

Lord Dubs said, but that kind of litigation need not be an excuse for inaction. My advice is

that the Interpretation Act 1978 speaks to this very issue. It provides that where an Act

repeals an enactment, the repeal does not affect any investigation, legal proceedings or

remedy. The irony is that the copyright Act of 1988, which includes Section 73, itself came

into force despite related ongoing legislation at that time.

The Government promised, more than a year ago, that they would consult on Section 73 in

the current review of the Communications Act. That has not happened. However, do they not

agree that the Communications Act 2003 superseded Section 73 by making a “must offer”

provision that ensured PSBs must offer their content to platforms,

“subject to the agreement of terms”?

That is the crucial difference, since it means that PSBs can enter into commercial

negotiations with each platform, as they do with BSkyB; in contrast, Section 73 prevents this

from happening by allowing the retransmission of PSB content without any payment in

recognition of the value that it represents.

The Bill is designed to remove burdensome regulation. Section 73 clearly meets that

criterion. Supporting its removal by subsequent amendment to the Bill will help to ensure that

our public service broadcasters can continue to produce and commission quality

programming made here in the UK.

7.34 pm

Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con):

53

My Lords, I start prepared in principle to cheer on its way any Bill labelled a Deregulation

Bill. Mind you, it has come out this afternoon, if one did not realise it from reading the Bill,

that much in it is not exactly deregulation but reregulation and so on. One of the worst

features of modern life is the multiplicity of regulations. I do not mean that regulation itself is

bad. Of course not; we all realise that regulation is essential in very large parts of life. The

problem, particularly for a small business, for example, is on the one hand the multiplicity of

regulations and on the other the fact that they are constantly changing. This changing factor is

part of the difficulty, which is a problem when it comes to a Deregulation Bill.

I have been arguing in favour of deregulation for a long time—over 40 years or so of

parliamentary life—but so have a lot of other people. The previous Government, as well as

the present one, have given a lot of attention to it. Yet throughout that time, and for that

matter before, regulations have been and still are breeding like weeds in a garden. While I

welcome the Bill in general, I have some reflections on Second Reading about deregulation

and the complications of regulation itself.

I do not think that I am the only Member of this House who believes that one problem with

our modern legislative drafting habits is that every Bill, even this one, is littered with

statutory instruments—even though the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and his colleagues have

succeeded very well in getting the Henry VIII one removed from this Bill. Yet statutory

instruments flow through the Moses Room like the waters of the sea when Moses first arrived

on its banks—except that there seems to be no way of stemming the tide, as he did when he

parted those waters. Moreover, they are only the statutory instruments that require debate by

your Lordships’ House. They are affirmative instruments, for the most part, but businesses

have to take account of many negative instruments as well.

I am contemplating moving a new version of Dunning’s famous Motion of 1780, which

would say that “The number of statutory instruments has increased, is increasing and ought to

be diminished”. How far we will get, I am not sure—and I emphasise “diminished” rather

than abolished. For the record, I do not blame the proliferation of statutory instruments on the

parliamentary draftsmen; I think that the blame lies within the various departments.

Legislation is insufficiently prepared, so the details of a Bill have to be filled in after

enactment. For some details, that is entirely in order, but too many are left to be filled in in

that way. I pay tribute in passing to the existence and work of the Delegated Powers and

Regulatory Reform Committee, and I look forward to its report on delegated powers

memoranda, which it is currently working on.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, my noble friend Lord Naseby and others, I am a supporter

of the work of the Law Commission in this field of deregulation, particularly on cancelling

parts of the law that are no longer required. I also think that it is better placed than Parliament

to look at areas of the law, and to suggest improvements and parts that should be done away

with. I am sympathetic to the idea of annual SLR Bills—an idea that should certainly be

considered further by government.

I recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, did just now, the difficulty of finding legislative

time for Law Commission Bills in general. I am also sympathetic to the idea that my noble

friend Lady Eaton drew our attention to: namely, the Local Government Association

proposals for rewiring licences in that field. My noble friend knows much more about it than

I do, but I have read something about it in the past and I have seen an account of it, about

which I can say only that it looked good to me.

54

I reflect on my experience of deregulation as a Minister. Sometimes, of course, efforts to

simplify have exactly the opposite effect. For example, when I was at the Treasury, along

with Customs and Excise we went to great efforts to make VAT easier for small businesses

instead of having a sharp cut-off between those who were not involved and those who were

fully enmeshed. Several alternative schemes were introduced for VAT for small businesses,

but the danger then was that you needed knowledgeable advice about which scheme you

ought to go to for your particular circumstances in business and how it was going to move

over the next few years, in order to know which scheme to choose. The schemes were good

and worth while, but deciding which one to use gave you another complicated headache.

I know what a difficult business deregulation inevitably is. I have every sympathy with my

noble friends on the Front Bench as we look forward to the Committee stage of the Bill—

which, as we have heard today, is going to be of some length and complexity, to put it no

stronger. This has been frequently described as a Christmas tree of a Bill, but I think that

Christmas is going to be a long time coming as far as my colleagues are concerned. However,

the Second Reading of the Bill is the time to congratulate the Government on tackling the

subject vigorously and to wish them the best of good fortune in the debates to come.

7.42 pm

Baroness Donaghy (Lab):

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cope of Berkeley. He will

not need reminding that it was Moses who created the first 10 regulations.

My mother used to say, “Say something positive first, dear”, so this is my positive bit. I

welcome the proposal in Clause 70 to clarify the role of the Director of Public Prosecutions

under the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004. Anything that strengthens the arm of the

Gangmasters Licensing Authority’s work is to be welcomed. I believe firmly that its remit

should be extended to cover the construction industry, as it is an area that is crying out for

some protection for exploited workers. However, today I shall concentrate on two areas:

Clause 1 on health and safety for the self-employed, and Clause 34 on short lets in London,

which have already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Grade, and a noble Lord who is

not in his place.

I will deal with the short lets in London first. If this measure is passed, and I profoundly hope

that it is not, the unintended consequences will be detrimental to rich and poor alike. This is a

strange gloss on the Prime Minister’s slogan that “We’re all in this together”. Take a settled

residential block north of the river. All the residents are comfortably off, with security

provided 24 hours a day. If this legislation is enacted, the sub-letters and online letting

companies will march in. The premiums are such that you can make three times as much

income as you can from ordinary longer-term lettings. Even if we disregard the diminution in

housing stock in London, which is already at crisis point, the health tourists would move in

and out with their families, treating the place like a hotel and an A&E department combined.

If you are really unlucky, the prostitutes and housing benefit fraudsters will move in, while at

best it will become a temporary residence for overseas businessmen and their families, who

are often no respecters of other people’s property or peace of mind. The residents will

experience an increase in unauthorised rubbish dumping—and flooding, if they live in flats

below the temporary residence. By the way, it will be virtually impossible for the fire

55

authorities to keep track of this. The nature of the residential block will change and there will

be nothing that the majority of residents can do about it. They in turn will be tempted to move

in order to escape the disruption when temporary letting becomes the norm in that block of

flats. To my knowledge, this is already happening at the margins.

As the noble Lord, Lord Tope, said, the British Hospitality Association, the Bed and

Breakfast Association and many others have sent submissions about this clause. Westminster

City Council has provided an excellent briefing as well. That council has done a sterling job

in fending off the marauders. Yes, I am praising a Conservative council. All those bodies are

saying the same thing: the proposed change will pave the way for largely unregulated short-

term online rental companies to operate more freely in London and remove the main

mechanism by which regulators currently have the chance to ensure the safety of the public.

The largest of these online companies, Airbnb, has over 23,000 premises in the UK for

paying guests—premises which do not comply with government guidelines on fire safety.

Other cities in the world are striving to adopt the same controls that we are about to throw

away. Paris, New York and Singapore have experienced housing inflation and anti-social

behaviour in residential neighbourhoods. Westminster City Council has dealt with 7,362

enforcement cases in the past 15 years, equating to nearly seven years’ housing supply. In

fact, this proposal is so unpopular, I think it must have been cooked up at the same dinner

party as employee share ownership and the abolition of 100 year-old health and safety

legislation on strict liability.

I turn to the proposal in Clause 1 to exempt the self-employed from health and safety law if

they are not on a prescribed list. The Government claim that they are following a

recommendation by Professor Lofstedt, but that is only partially true. The professor must be

rather bruised by his encounters with this Government. He makes a recommendation that is

circled about with conditions and caution, and it is snatched by this Government like a

hungry child wanting a liqueur chocolate—of course, they will be able to have liqueur

chocolate fairly soon. Professor Lofstedt indicated that any exemption should be for those,

“whose work activities pose no potential risk of harm to others”.

The Minister for Government Policy, Oliver Letwin, said that,

“about two thirds of the people in the country who are self-employed will no longer be

covered by the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/2/14;

col. 41.]

That really gives the game away, doesn’t it? It is a sad day when we mark the 40th

anniversary of that Act in this way.

It is also regrettable that the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health was dismissed by

the Solicitor-General as an organisation of “consultants”. I know that IOSH has written to

correct this but it should be remembered that it has a royal charter and 44,000 members

worldwide and is recognised by the ILO. It is a distinguished and knowledgeable organisation

and is severely concerned by this clause. It deserves to be listened to.

The current draft of prescribed activities, produced very late in the day, includes construction,

which I know a bit about. I am not reassured. I make it clear that I am not referring to the

56

large construction companies, which are seized of the business case for a healthy and safe

building site. It is the refurbishment industry, which is notorious for recruiting underskilled

workers and for accidents. What happens if an employer informs his workers, who may be

bogus self-employed, that, “This is not a building site so we’re exempt”? They are desperate

for work and will take what they are given. Will the Government make it clear what is and

what is not a building site? Is scaffolding around a house or a trench dug in the garden to be

covered by the word “construction”? Are self- employed plumbers, electricians and

carpenters covered in domestic housing? If not, how will the householder be alerted?

It is estimated that 90% of construction workers in London are self-employed or bogus self-

employed. There is a worrying proportion of cowboys operating in London: small operators

who know that there is a slim chance that they will be inspected by the HSE and who will

exempt themselves from the prescribed list with little or no comeback, so there is an

increased risk premium in London for workers and the public.

I remind the House that we kill 50 construction workers a year in accidents at work, let alone

serious injuries and the scandal of unreported accidents. In addition, 32 construction workers

die every week of lung-related diseases, and that figure is going up, not down. If three-

quarters of the self-employed are to be exempt, as Oliver Letwin says, this must include some

construction and allied workers.

The current Health and Safety at Work etc. Act is simple and easily understood. Everyone

knows where they stand. Creating a prescribed list will cause confusion and encourage the

cowboys.

7.50 pm

Lord Clement-Jones (LD):

My Lords, having seen successive deregulation units created and then relabelled within

government over the past 25 years, I can see that it is clear that, more than previous

Governments, the coalition has got to grips with the deregulation agenda. I therefore

welcome many aspects of the Bill and in particular the further cuts in red tape in the

Licensing Act regulation, particularly those relating to community events.

There are, however, differing views as to what is sensible deregulation to ease a regulatory

burden and what should be retained to protect the consumer, keep a market open or protect an

individual right. I hope, therefore, that the Government will prove as flexible as they were in

response to pre-legislative scrutiny.

There are a number of issues about the content of the Bill. As we have heard from many

noble Lords, if the BBC is to continue to be financed by the licence fee, it is important that

we retain a system that is successful in maintaining the current low levels of evasion and of

collection costs. At the very least, the Government should review, under Clauses 59 and 60,

the appropriate penalties for non-payment of the licence fee, which should be considered as

part of the total review of the BBC charter and licence fee funding.

As we have also heard, Clause 34 involves amendments to Section 25 of the Greater London

Council (General Powers) Acts 1973 and 1983, which require that London residential

property owners and tenants seek planning approval prior to using residential property to sell

57

accommodation on a night-by-night basis. We have heard also that many of us have seen the

brief from Westminster City Council. This makes a devastating case against the proposal. We

are in the middle of a major shortage of housing accommodation in London at a time of

strongly rising population. This would lead to an unsustainable loss of permanent residential

accommodation.

Existing provisions ensure that whole blocks of flats are not blighted by hotel-type use year

round. I hope that the Government listen to the very council that would be most affected. We

must keep London as a place to live, not just to visit. As the British Hospitality Association

says, and as we also heard today, cities such as Paris, New York and Singapore have enacted

measures recently to control the surge in commercial use of residential properties. Have the

Government carried out an impact assessment on these proposals?

Another area where there seems to have been no economic-impact assessment is the

provisions of Clause 51 and Schedule 15. These provisions potentially mean not only that the

summer holidays could be a great deal shorter but also that each of 25,000 schools in England

could have its own holiday arrangements, causing confusion for parents, teachers, pupils and

industry. This could, not least, have a major impact on the UK hospitality and tourism

industry, which employs 3 million people, many of them in seaside areas. We have heard the

reference to BALPPA, which represents British leisure parks and attractions. It says, in its

brief:

“Shifting term times would be devastating for those that rely on seasonal trade which cannot

be recouped elsewhere”.

It points out that, where similar schemes have been introduced in the US, the evidence clearly

shows that moving school holidays reduces tourism spending, and that this is not made up

elsewhere.

Coming to the omissions rather than commissions, and with all due deference to the noble

Lord, Lord Rooker, who is not in his place, I have some ideas for additions to the Bill. We

have the issue of busking. The Mayor of London has rightly been fulsome about the place of

busking in London life. In the Bill we should explicitly remove Part 5 of the London Local

Authorities Act 2000, which provides for busking licensing schemes at individual London

councils’ discretion. We should also remove Section 54(14) of the Metropolitan Police Act

1839, which was recently used against buskers in Leicester Square.

As I explained to the House, the King’s Parade, the winners of the mayor’s busking

competition, were interrupted by the police mid-song as they performed in Leicester Square

and informed that they were in breach of Section 54 of the archaic 1839 Metropolitan Police

Act. They were bundled into a van by eight officers and held at Paddington police station for

more than six hours. This 174-year-old piece of legislation, which also—I think the noble

Lord, Lord Whitty, would be pleased by this—prohibits kite flying, sleigh riding and doorbell

ringing, was used to justify the arrest.

There are more than adequate powers under separate legislation to deal with noise nuisance

and anti-social behaviour. For example, there is the Environmental Protection Act 1990 or the

Control of Pollution Act 1974. There are also powers to make by-laws available to local

authorities with respect to street nuisance. Camden, under the London Local Authorities Act,

has banned street music at any time, amplified or unamplified, except through a special

58

busking licence. Camden’s approach runs completely counter to the arguments heard and

accepted by government and Parliament during the Live Music Act debates.

We have also heard that another potential missed opportunity is the inclusion of provisions to

repeal Section 73 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. We have heard eloquent

speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Dubs, Lord Grade and Lord Macdonald on this subject.

It is quite clear that Section 73 of the CDPA is an outdated copyright exception that allows

cable operators to retransmit PSB channels without permission or payment to broadcasters or

to the people who created the content. We have heard why it was introduced. Cable is now a

highly effective and well resourced competitor to Sky and Freeview. Pay TV platforms are

able to make money from PSB content while benefiting from a regulatory regime under

which no payment goes back to the public service broadcaster or to any content creator.

As we have head, reform is even more urgent as a result of personal video recorders—PVRs.

These enable consumers to record programmes and avoid watching advertisements. PVRs are

revenue-earning and customer-retention devices, yet none of the value that the pay TV

platforms derive from them reaches those who help to create the content on which they

depend. Section 73 now simply represents a subsidy from the PSBs to cable operators.

Section 73 is also being relied on by online service providers, such as TVCatchup, to make

money from the PSB channels by retransmitting them while selling their own advertising

around PSB content.

The Government have said that they must wait for the end of current litigation with

TVCatchup, but there are no legal reasons that would prevent them supporting any

amendment to the Deregulation Bill. Indeed, ongoing litigation is not affected by a change of

law, as set out in the Interpretation Act 1978. The UK is not alone in reviewing this issue. In

the US, News Corporation—yes, News Corporation—has led the charge in favour of fees. I

urge the Government to consider using the Bill to promote growth in the creative industries

by including a clause to repeal Section 73.

Finally, we need an urgent review of noise abatement legislation to cater for the situation

where a venue with a very good record and no complaints is subject to a complaint or

potential complaint from a new occupier or developer. Venues are closing with great rapidity

as a result of this inappropriate use of noise legislation. We need to act fast. I look forward to

my noble friend’s reply.

7.59 pm

Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab):

My Lords, I will speak on housing and, like my noble friends, against the folly of Clause 1

and its changes to the Health and Safety at Work Act. Clause 29 reduces the qualifying

period for the right to buy from five to three years. We know that this is part of what the

Government have labelled “reinvigorating the right to buy”. It has been accompanied by

secondary legislation that increased the maximum percentage discount for houses sold to

70%, and increased the cash cap to £75,000—£100,000 in London—which in future is to be

uprated by CPI.

We want to see people enabled to purchase a home, and we support the right to buy.

However, housing is in crisis in this country, and especially affordable housing. Last year the

59

Government built the lowest number of homes for social rent for more than 20 years and

since records began. Section 106 agreements have been watered down, the capital budget for

affordable housing has been cut by 60%, and the affordable rent model is anything but

affordable. If recent reports are true, the Government are in panic over the prospect of yet a

further fall in housebuilding as the general election looms. The Government’s favourite

scapegoat to blame is the planning system, but can the Minister confirm that some 9,000 sites

with full planning permission have not yet started building?

Therefore we will press the Government on their declared replacement policy. The

formulation which they adopt is that they would use the receipts from additional—note, not

all—right to buy sales to replace every additional home sold. We will wish to probe in

Committee exactly what that means and how it would work in practice. It does not appear to

cover sales under the preserved right to buy, which is to the detriment of the finances of

housing associations.

We can see the merit of rationalising technical housing standards and their inclusion in the

main building regulations, albeit with scope to deal with local circumstances. The Minister

will be aware of the briefing from Leonard Cheshire which welcomes proposals to

incorporate lifetime homes standards into building regulations, but expresses concern that

they will potentially be optional. We will wish to be reassured that this is not the case.

We should be proud of our health and safety system in the UK. Over 40 years it has helped

save countless lives and protected many from injury and ill health. Since this Government

came to office there have been three reviews of its scope and operations — that of the noble

Lord, Lord Young of Graffham, of Professor Lofstedt, and the triennial review. Each in its

way has concluded that the system and the HSE is fit for purpose and doing an effective job.

We oppose Clause 1 not on ideological grounds, nor because our instinct is to resist any

weakening of health and safety requirements, and nor because we believe that there is still a

lingering antipathy to its cause in some higher reaches of government. We oppose it because

whatever minor benefits the clause might bring are more than outweighed by the confusion

and uncertainty it will engender.

The position at present is very clear. Under Section 3(2) of the 1974 Act every self-employed

person is required to conduct their undertaking to ensure that,

“so far as is reasonably practicable … he and other persons … are not thereby exposed to

risks to their health or safety”.

What could be fairer or more decent than that? Yet the Bill will restrict the requirement to

those engaged in prescribed undertakings expressed by the Minister in another place to be

“high-risk” activities. Notwithstanding that there is only a draft list of prescribed

undertakings thus far—although an HSE consultation with a list commenced just today—

Oliver Letwin proclaimed in another place that I think about two-thirds of people who are

self-employed will no longer be covered by the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. Why is

that something to be proud of?

The Government, as my noble friend Lady Donaghy said, point to Professor Lofstedt as the

reason for doing that, but that was not his recommendation. He recommended that an

60

exemption should apply to those self-employed who have no employees and who pose no

potential risk of harm to others. Even then, he acknowledged:

“The actual burden that the regulations currently place upon these self-employed may not be

particularly significant”.

That point was reinforced by evidence from IOSH to the Public Bill Committee, where

Richard Jones made clear:

“To our mind, the proposed exempted group … is not overly burdened by health and safety at

the moment”.—[Official Report, Commons, Public Bill Committee, 25/2/14; col. 5.]

As the TUC points out, there is no need to make any change, because anyone who is self-

employed but does not pose a risk to themselves or others cannot be prosecuted. They have

no need to do a written risk assessment.

The HSE was clear that the best basis for any exemption should be to allow it only to those

who would not be expected to put others at risk at any point in the normal course of their

work and only if they did not work in certain prescribed industries. Paragraph 18 of the 2013

impact assessment states that,

“we explored the possibility of being wholly prescriptive and making a comprehensive list of

the occupations, industries, or combinations thereof that would be covered by the exemption

… However, discussion with sector experts within HSE made it clear that within occupations

and industries there are many exceptions and atypical cases. Relying exclusively on such an

approach would therefore risk unintended consequences”.

What is the huge burden that offending legislation imposes on the self-employed, and which

holds back the advance of entrepreneurial zeal? The HSE’s original assessment was that the

risk assessment would take—15 minutes a year. Annual savings for the new and existing self-

employed would be about £500,000 a year—in aggregate, that is—but there would be upfront

familiarisation costs of nearly £2 million. All of that, therefore, for the self-employed to save

a quarter of an hour a year and on average less than 50p. The figures for today’s updated

assessment tell the same story.

However, the proposition for exemption now in the Bill has greater health and safety risks.

The HSE made clear that some of the occupations proposed to be exempt have injury rates

statistically higher than the average for all occupations. These, it said, include motor

mechanics, furniture manufacturers, animal care occupations, metalworking, and

maintenance fitters. That is a deeply flawed and dangerous position for the Government to

take.

First, in framing the exemption using a prescribed list approach, we know that some who

operate in risky businesses in a risky way will fall within the exemption. Secondly, even if

the exemption could be phrased in a narrower way, the estimated savings are tiny. The

prospect of exemption for some will provide another spur to the encouragement for

individuals to declare a self-employed status—bogus or otherwise.

There is scope for huge confusion about whether someone will be exempt or not, particularly

among the self-employed, who might typically get their information through informal

61

channels and in circumstances when Ministers are talking up the scale and scope of

exemptions. There could be confusion for those who take on an employee for part of a year,

or whose activities are partly within a prescribed undertaking and partly outside. I hope that

the Government will reflect and draw back from Clause 1.

8.07 pm

Lord Low of Dalston (CB):

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will flag up a couple of points in the gap which will

need further attention as we go through the Bill.

There is a dearth of accessible housing in the UK. As a result, one in six disabled people and

more than half of disabled children live in accommodation that is not suitable for their needs.

The need for disabled-friendly housing will only grow as the population ages, and providing

good housing can reduce the need for care. The Government’s proposal to incorporate

lifetime homes and wheelchair-accessible standards into building regulations is therefore

most welcome. However, I am concerned that those standards will be only optional and

concerned at the suggestion that planning authorities will be able to adopt them only where

they can satisfy a rigorous needs test and show that they are strictly necessary and justifiable,

not just desirable.

The GLA has committed to all new buildings matching lifetime homes standards and to 10%

of all new homes being built to wheelchair-accessible standards. I would like to see the

approach taken by successive mayors in London rolled out across the UK and I believe that

the Bill should be encouraging that. Instead, I am concerned that it could actively discourage

authorities from taking that positive approach if they are required to jump through too many

bureaucratic hoops. I therefore seek the Minister’s assurance that the Government accept that

the level of evidence gathered by the GLA is sufficiently rigorous to support the introduction

of lifetime homes and wheelchair-accessible standards. I would also like to see an exemption

from the community infrastructure levy for fully wheelchair-accessible housing and a

reduction for that which meets the lifetime homes standard.

I turn to my second point. The Bill includes provisions on parking. Clause 38 amends the

Road Traffic Act to prevent local authorities from issuing penalty charge notices through the

post and using CCTV for parking enforcement in particular circumstances. I was glad to see

that the Opposition have some reservations about this. The clause was inserted following a

government consultation on local authority parking strategies. The Government

acknowledged that a common theme in responses to the consultation was the need for a

uniform approach to pavement parking, but this has not been followed up in the Bill. That is a

major omission. Pavement parking is dangerous for pedestrians, especially parents with

pushchairs, wheelchair users and other disabled people, including blind and partially sighted

people, who may be forced out into the road where they cannot see oncoming traffic.

Pavements are not designed to take the weight of vehicles and they cause pavements to crack

and the tarmac surface to subside. This is also a hazard to pedestrians, who may trip on

broken pavements, and particularly to blind and partially sighted people, who cannot observe

the damage. It is also expensive. Local authorities paid more than £1 billion on repairing

kerbs, pavements and walkways between 2006 and 2010; £106 million was also paid in

compensation claims to people tripping and falling on broken pavements during the same

five-year period.

62

Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, with the support of at least a dozen other

organisations, is calling for laws across the UK prohibiting pavement parking unless

specifically permitted, such as have been in place in Greater London since 1974. Local

authorities report that existing measures are insufficient. In a recent YouGov survey, 78% of

councillors supported a national law with flexibility for local authorities to make exemptions.

The Transport Select Committee described the current system as unduly complex and

difficult for motorists to understand. A Private Member’s Bill with cross-party support has

been presented in the other place by Martin Horwood MP. There is considerable support for a

law of this type, and I very much hope that the Government will give it serious consideration.

8.12 pm

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab):

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate, which—a bit like this Christmas tree of a

Bill—has been like a Christmas party, with people calling in to raise concerns, including

about inadequate consultation, last-minute clauses and lack of evidence, which leads us to

query whether this Bill is more about dogma than good governance. Why do the Government

speak with a forked tongue—more red tape for charities and unions under the lobby Bill, as

my noble friend Lord Monks reminded us; more red tape for trading standards officers under

the consumer Bill; and an attack on localism in this Bill, despite the Localism Act passed in

the Session before last? None of us likes red tape—unless it is around those presents under

the Christmas tree—but it is worth remembering that regulation is brought in for pretty good

reasons, such as to safeguard children or the public, or, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord

Fowler, to ensure that the interests of the consumer is pre-eminent. Whether we are

introducing or abolishing regulation, it is always worth asking who it helps and whether it is

worth the candle.

Like the Consumer Rights Bill, which we debated last week, I like the title of this Bill, as

indeed I think does the noble Lord, Lord Cope. It is the content that leaves me a bit queasy,

for the reasons that we have heard today. As the 35th speaker, there is nothing new for me to

say, but I think that one or two themes have emerged. The first is the absence of evidence for

some of these changes. The second is the inadequate consultation that took place,

particularly with local authorities over both alcohol and minicab licensing, or with the

taxi industry over the clauses that put the safety of passengers at risk. Indeed, there

seems to be a lack of consideration for consumers, just six days after the Second

Reading of the Consumer Rights Bill.

I start with Clause 1. Apart from the points elaborated by my noble friends Lady Andrews,

Lady Donaghy, Lord Monks, Lord Collins, Lord Whitty, Lord McKenzie and Lord Rooker,

as well as the noble Lords, Lord Stoneham and Lord Fowler, I wonder how the Bill provides

for the interests of those, mostly the elderly, whose hairdresser visits them at home; those

who are passengers of self-employed drivers; and myriad others who are protected by the

Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. That legislation places duties on the self-employed

to ensure that they do not expose themselves or others, including non-employees, to health

and safety risks. That includes customers, clients, visitors and the public. Who asked those

people whether they wanted to lose such protection?

Similarly with taxis and minicabs, serious concerns have been raised by my noble

friends Lord Monks, Lord Whitty, Lord Collins, Lord Davies of Oldham, Lady Turner

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and Lady Thornton, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and the noble Lords,

Lord Tope and Lord Hussain. Like everyone on the government and opposition

Benches—not, I have to say, the Bishops’ or the Cross Benches—I have visited Brighton

many times for the wonderful delights of party conferences. We arrive at the station

and jump into those very familiar Brighton and Hove cabs, and we know that we are

going to be safe. We know that they have been tested for safety and that their drivers

have been tested for competence, insurance and trustworthiness. Brighton and Hove, by

way of example, now worries that ending annual relicensing will diminish its

effectiveness as a regulator, while having out-of-area cabs on its streets—over which the

authority has no control—will pose a risk to customers. As my noble friends have

already said, it will be women who will be the most vulnerable to illegal pick-ups by

unlicensed drivers in minicabs or even from licensed drivers, who will no longer be

checked annually. So just who asked for this measure, introduced with minimal

consultation? It was certainly not women or passengers, nor, as we have heard, the Suzy

Lamplugh Trust or crime commissioners.

As for banning CCTV for parking, this comes from the same Government who brought in the

Localism Act but now decide to dictate to local authorities how they can enforce, or not

enforce, parking as they think best, and despite six of the eight consultation responses

opposing a CCTV ban. As the noble Lord, Lord Tope, said, it is, after all, local government

that knows its area best. In my own borough of Camden, more than 85% of CCTV

enforcements cover major junctions, bus stops, pedestrian crossings and no-waiting areas. In

a busy urban area these are key to keeping traffic moving and for safety, as the noble Lord,

Lord Low, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and my noble friends Lord Davies of Oldham

and Lord Whitty said.

On alcohol licensing, my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, outlined the worry that

the new ancillary licences might allow virtually any business, when serving drink is not its

primary purpose, to sell alcohol. Health groups fear that this could lead to virtually unlimited

alcohol premises. Who demanded this? Why were local authorities, health bodies and others

not properly consulted? What research was undertaken on any downside, including any

impact on the emergency and ancillary services? Why is there no requirement to make public

health a licensing condition? Why is there no minimum price legislation? And why piecemeal

changes rather than making this part of a proper strategy, which the Government had laid out

in 2012 but seem to have abandoned, to tackle the million crimes linked to alcohol, let alone

the cost to our health service?

Turning to insolvency practitioners, here the Government, I think, have got it wrong with

their suggested regime of partial authorisation for insolvency practitioners, as my noble

friend Lord Rooker, the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord

Mackay, said. Splitting the regulation of this tiny profession into two—for company and for

individual insolvencies—would particularly harm small firms, two-thirds of which do both

corporate and personal insolvency work, just at the same time as the Government’s small

business Bill is meant to be helping small businesses.

Furthermore, it would require the development, delivery and oversight of new, additional

systems of exams and qualifications. It would also allow some insolvency practitioners to

undertake corporate bankruptcies, which almost always also affect the status of the

individuals involved, with no qualification over the needs of the latter. In Committee, we will

seek to ensure that this does not become the case. Regulation is usually for the consumers, the

64

community or the vulnerable, as my noble friend Lady Turner said. It used to be the Tories

who argued that the City was overregulated, and look where that led us.

More locally, as a cyclist—albeit not today in lycra cycling from Cambridge and across

Westminster Bridge—I take great comfort from knowing that lorries on our roads are not

overloaded, that their tyre pressures are checked, that their drivers are qualified, that their

insurance is in place, that their fumes are not excessive and that their brakes work. All of that,

of course, is as a result of regulation. However, that does not seem to be enough for this

Government. They now want all regulators to include the growth duty, including, I presume,

the Health and Safety Executive, the Information Commissioner, the Gambling Commission,

the Charity Commission, the Electoral Commission, the Health and Care Professions

Council, Monitor, the Legal Services Board and Ofsted—soon to be headed, we gather, by a

Tory donor if the papers are to be believed. All those will now have the growth duty. It will

be essential that the economic growth strategy does not trump the principal objective of those

regulators, because that surely is the protection of the public interest.

Will the Government heed the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro, my

noble friends Lady Andrews and Lady Thornton, the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, the ICC, the

noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve, and indeed the Joint Committee on Human

Rights, which said:

“Applying the economic growth duty to the EHRC poses a significant risk to the EHRC’s

independence”,

because it would be compelled take directions from the Secretary of State? Has dogma

trumped common sense and good governance? Anyway, is this really deregulatory, as my

noble friend Lady Andrews asked?

There are other issues on which we will await with interest the response of the Government,

including the proposal from my noble friend Lord Macdonald to amend the copyright Act

1988 in relation to broadcasting. That attracted the support of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-

Jones, and my noble friend Lord Dubs, as well as the noble Lord, Lord Grade.

In the light of comments by the noble Lords, Lord Fowler, Lord Grade, Lord Stoneham, Lord

Sharkey and Lord Clement-Jones, we also seek reassurance from the Minister that no

decision on decriminalising BBC licence non-payment will be taken prior to the review of the

royal charter.

We also look forward to the Minister’s response to other issues raised by my noble friends

Lady Donaghy, Lady Turner, Lady Andrews, Lord Whitty, Lord Davies, Lord McKenzie and

Lord Rooker and the noble Lords, Lord Stoneham, Lord Grade and Lord Clement-Jones, on a

range of issues, such as right to buy, London short lets, gangmasters, maritime investigations

and even school holidays.

Despite the words of the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, there is no demand from consumers

for a relaxation of the settled position on Sunday trading. Let us leave well alone something

that balances family shopping preferences with workers’ rights, the interests of corner shops

and the legitimate expectations of churchgoers.

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Like the noble Lords, Lord Bew and Lord Brabazon, I welcome paragraph 40 of Schedule 20

in Part 8—yes, I did read it. It repeals sections of the Defamation Act 1996, as would have

been the case with the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, to which we

gave a Second Reading on 27 June, but which now will not be needed in the light of this

legislation.

I turn finally to knitting yarns. Perhaps I see myself as une tricoteuse at la Place de la

Révolution, or Place de la Concorde as it is now, watching the guillotine fall on the supposed

red tape. But this is no revolution. It is a slightly tacky hotchpotch of a Bill, conceived for

effect and designed by committee. We will bless the bits that do no harm and welcome the

few that help, but we will seek to amend those that pose risks to workers, consumers and to

the public at large.

8.25 pm

Lord Wallace of Saltaire:

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest of which the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, in his

opening speech reminded me. My wife was a member of the previous Government’s Better

Regulation Commission from 2006 to 2008. She reminds me that after the change of Prime

Minister the previous Labour Government abolished it.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, reminded us that what the House of Lords does best, and what

is indeed becoming our core role, is to examine the details of legislation placed before us. We

can all agree that this Bill has a wealth of detail. Those who got all the way through to

Schedule 20 understand that fully and thus we shall have lots to explore at the Committee

stage. It is evident from today’s debate that there is particular concern over Clause 1 and

Clauses 10 to 12. Many other clauses and parts of schedules have been warmly welcomed.

Some have been queried, with much more information requested, and there will indeed be

much to explore in Committee which will start when we return in October. I note what is

being said about generous time being needed for that stage.

Between now and then the Government, as always, are open to consult off the Floor, with all

those who wish to do so, including the Local Government Association, although not within

this Bill taking on the whole universe of local licensing, which the noble Baroness, Lady

Eaton, perhaps suggested. The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, requested hyperlinks to previous

legislation. In informal consultations the other day, the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, asked for a

Keeling schedule for the entire Bill. We have noted both of those requests and will see what

we can do. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, talked about the distinction between better regulation,

smart regulation and fit regulation. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and others said, there is a

difference between deregulation and re-regulation.

One of the things we have learnt over the past few years is that there is a constant need for

adjustment and adaptation in regulation. We need to look constantly at what is no longer

necessary, even as we look at what is now needed. We need a great deal more regulation of

the internet, for example. If the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, were here, he would have linked

the transformation of broadcasting with that of the transformation of the taxi market by things

like Uber and the transformation of short-term lets by the arrival of Airbnb. These are all new

phenomena that technology has pushed on us in what one of the contributors remarked as

being this fast-changing digital world.

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I note, however, that excessive regulation does sink economies. It was not until the crash of

the Greek economy and finances that we discovered just how amazingly overregulated the

Greek economy was and how much that held it back. I remember as a student the beginnings

of the deregulation of the British economy by that nowadays underestimated politician,

Edward Heath, in his deregulation of the retail market. The growth agenda is important and

we always have to look at it in making sure that old regulations go even as new regulations

are sometimes needed.

Underlying some of our discussions there have been suspicions of a hidden agenda: whether

or not the health and safety culture is threatened—I wish to assure noble Lords that it is not;

whether the BBC is about to be undermined; whether the proposals on marine accidents are

really an attempt to get away from marine accident investigations. Again, I can assure noble

Lords that they are not. We will come back to those issues in detail in Committee.

A number of other issues have been raised that are not currently within the Bill. The noble

Lords, Lord Dubs, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Grade and Lord Macdonald of Tradeston,

referred to the issue of retransmission revenues. I listened with interest to some of this. I think

I have received nearly a dozen communications from Virgin Media in Saltaire over the past

12 months. Since it put cable through Saltaire it is extremely keen for us all to subscribe and

is sending me some extremely generously printed brochures almost every month.

I take the point that public service broadcasters should not be subsidising commercial

enterprises. We are of course willing to talk to others about how and within what framework

we address Section 73 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, although the Government

may be reluctant to concede that that fits appropriately within this Bill.

I noted in Schedule 20 that anyone who keeps a pigsty is part of what we are now repealing. I

am just old enough as a small boy to have visited farms where they still had pigsties and

indeed once visited a farm where they were in the action of killing a pig. That is part of the

thing that no longer takes place and therefore we no longer need it.

We also touched on busking and Sunday trading. I share the feeling of the noble Baroness,

Lady Hayter, that it is probably quite a good thing that we are not tackling Sunday trading as

well as everything else on this occasion. Perhaps the next Government will wish to reopen

that immediately.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, asked where the figures for savings from the Bill came

from. Officials have prepared a summary table of the Bill and I am very happy to share this

with the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, following the debate and to put it in the Library for all

noble Lords. It is part of the Red Tape Challenge. Many of these are estimates but we are

fairly confident that they are not too imprecise.

Clause 1, the health and safety clause, has clearly set a number of concerns running. The

prescribed list of high-hazard activities is now being consulted on. The consultation went out

today and is available online. It will run for 12 weeks which means that it will be completed

by the Committee stage and the regulators will thus be able to issue at least some guidance

towards that by the time we are in Committee. The new regulations will use definitions of

health and safety already present in law, which means that we are not changing the context of

health and safety. In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, I am informed that

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Professor Löfstedt wrote to the Commons committee in support of the clause as drafted. We

will both investigate further to see who is quoting Professor Löfstedt more directly.

On the question on whether the number of self-employed workers is growing because of the

expansion of bogus self-employed contracts, the Government are taking parallel action in

other forums to stop the use of such bogus contracts. For example, in this year’s Finance Bill,

the Government introduced changes to the agency tax rules to put a stop to the growing use

of those requirements. This is not intended to allow any expansion in that area. We are

looking at professional people who work at home and do not employ others. That is the

category from which we hope to lift unnecessary regulations.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and other noble Lords raised the question of tribunals.

There is no evidence to suggest that the wider recommendations prevent reoffence. That is

why the Government decided to remove this burden. In one very clear recent case involving

the Metropolitan Police and a diplomatic protection officer, the tribunal made no wider

recommendations but the Metropolitan Police has made it clear that it recognises that there

are wider concerns. I do not think this is such a difficult issue. There is some evidence, which

was presented to the Government in the consultation, that this involved additional cost for

smaller employers and did not produce great benefit for others.

A lot was said about taxis and private hire vehicles and I am sure that we will have an

impassioned debate on this issue in Committee. We are conscious that there is a range

of concerns including, as a number of noble Lords have said, questions of safety. The

question of the use of private hire vehicles by others when they are off-duty clearly

needs to be examined. However, we have looked at the Law Commission

recommendations and are satisfied that taking these measures forward neither

undermines the Law Commission review nor necessarily means that we will not take the

Law Commission proposals into account at a later stage when it produces its Bill.

Parking has also raised a lot of issues for many noble Lords, with the question of CCTV and

parking fines. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, that we have not considered

the risks of removing the use of CCTV as we are not talking about doing that. There were a

number of questions about how CCTV is used at a local level, on which all of us have

slightly different and ambivalent views. Again, we will come back to that in detail in

Committee.

On short-term lets, as someone who had never really thought about this problem previously, I

listened with interest. I live close to Wimbledon where, every year, a number of well-off local

people seem to let out their houses for two weeks at a time for remarkably large sums. I have

to admit that the Wallaces had considered whether we should go away for two weeks. My

wife, however, said no, because she actually likes going to Wimbledon herself rather than

sitting and watching it on TV. There are some important issues about, first, what is now

happening; secondly, why the regulations in London are different from those in the rest of the

country; thirdly, how far the evolution of short-term letting through the internet is beginning

to change the situation anyway; and fourthly, therefore, how we respond to that.

On the right to buy, we recognise worries about whether there is an underlying agenda and

how this will affect the future provision of social housing. A problem we all face with social

housing is that the previous Government did not build enough social housing and this

Government have so far, disappointingly, not been able to build as much social housing as we

68

would like. Part of what is required under the Bill is that councils which sell houses use the

money to build new social housing as part of the deal.

On optional building regulations, Clause 32 will not amend standards related to safety. It will

allow for certain requirements to be adapted locally, but will provide for the range of what

standards are permissible to be set nationally. I am happy to discuss this further with the

noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and others as part of the consultation between now and

Committee stage.

Lord Rooker:

The Minister referred to 12 weeks earlier. We are going to have at least 12 weeks between

Second Reading and the start of Committee stage. That is very unusual. I can see at least 800

or 900 amendments. If events take their course, they will not be tabled until 10 October.

Would it not be a good idea for the staff of the House, and the Minister’s own staff who are

providing those responses, if we were able to table amendments from, say, 1 September

rather than have to put them all in on the day we come back, which would not be conducive

to having a decent debate on the Bill? It is a bit unusual, but we are in unusual times. We can

do it if we decide to do so. Perhaps the Minister could take some advice and come back on

that.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire:

That is a very constructive suggestion. I will take it away and we will discuss it.

On short-term lets in London, I am told that the question was included in the consultation

issued in February last year on a review of the property conditions of the private rented

sector. Nearly 100 responses were received and the Government will publish their response

shortly.

One of the happy surprises I have in facing this Bill is that my initial feeling that the rights of

way clauses of the Bill would be the most difficult turns out not to be the case. The Ramblers,

the Country Land and Business Association and others have written to me to say that they are

united in asking for no further amendments to this part. I hope that we can all hold to that. It

is remarkably unusual to find a situation in which all those involved in a deeply contentious

area, which has been contentious for a very long time, have come to an agreement and are

asking us to put it into law. Let us see how far we can get on that following their consensus.

The noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, and others asked about the TV licensing review. As a matter

of course, I can tell him that the terms of reference will be laid in the Libraries of both

Houses and the review itself must begin within three months of the Bill receiving Royal

Assent.

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara:

That was not the main purpose of most of the comments, which was to allow for a discussion

of the terms of reference of that review on the Floor of the Chamber. Simply to place them in

the Libraries is not sufficient. Will the noble Lord reconsider that?

Lord Wallace of Saltaire:

69

I am told that the Government are currently committed to putting the terms of reference to

both Houses at a later stage. I think that the noble Lord is asking for an early consultation.

Again, let us talk off the Floor and see how far we get on that. My noble friend Lord Gardiner

speaks for the DCMS and it may therefore be particularly appropriate that he would speak on

that.

The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, was particularly concerned about the potential

growth of alcohol consumption. I hope that in Committee we will be able to reassure him

about what is proposed in these measures, which I recall have been discussed in terms of

local arrangements allowing local communities to have events with fewer hoops to jump

through in what I am told are community and ancillary sellers notices. The intention is

strongly that this will be limited to a small part of any business that is allowed to do so. We

do not see hairdressers offering gin and tonics to those who come to have their hair cut,

which I think was almost what the noble Lord was suggesting, and other matters of that sort.

Again, we will explore that further in Committee.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, had concerns about the repeal of the duty of the Senior

President of Tribunals to report. I am told that, since the duty to report was introduced in

2007, other and more effective feedback mechanisms have been introduced—the production

of a report by the Senior President of Tribunals no longer represents the most effective way

of providing feedback. What the tribunals now do is to introduce summary reasons in

employment support allowance appeals, starting initially on four sites. These summary

reports have been found to be more useful than what was done before. Again, I am happy to

talk further if that helps.

I have taken a lot of time and I have not talked about the closure of small prisons or the whole

relationship between the Law Commission and this Bill. It is perhaps time for a short debate

on the future role of the Law Commission as there is quite a lot of interest in that.

Before I close, I will talk about the question of the growth duty and in particular the EHRC,

because I know there is a lot of concern about that. We are considering the question of how

far the growth duty extends to non-economic regulators. Again, that is something that we will

discuss further. We look forward to a lively and lengthy Committee stage. I congratulate all

those who have read the entire Bill all the way through to the end of Schedule 20. I beg to

move.

Bill read a second time.