Clause 3 - Applications for Registration andRenewal of Registration
Vehicles (Crime) Bill
11:15 am
Mr John Bercow (Buckingham, Conservative)
My hon. Friend powerfully underlines the argument. As an experienced member of Standing Committees, he will remember that unless we press an issue to a Division, nothing prevents us from raising it at a later stage in our deliberations. I am gaining the impression that he might be encouraging my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of York and I to do just that and perhaps to draft a further amendment. However, given the slightly—I shall not describe it as ``tricky''— unenthusiastic response from the Minister to the fairly modest amendment that I proposed to the previous clause, it does not seem likely that he will enthusiastically receive the broader amendment that my hon. Friend is commending, but that is no reason why we should not try to persuade him to accept it.
Burdens are not a matter of theory or of the abstract. We are talking not about wallowing in the realms of metaphysical abstraction, as Burke would have put it, but about the concrete, the specific, the everyday and the unavoidable. My hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield, who is a champion of businesses in general and of small businesses in particular, will be aware from his close knowledge of such matters that the proportion of small businesses in the motor salvage sector is strikingly large. We must be aware of that, given that we are talking about small companies that will for the first time be confronted with a regulatory regime for which there is a justification and which could prove effective in reducing vehicle crime. But we do not want to over-egg the pudding.
I wish gently and good-naturedly to pick the Minister up on his partisan observation when he referred to the great debate between centralised government and local authority discretion. He referred—somewhat piously, I thought—to the record of previous Governments and suggested that it was that of a centralising Administration, whereas he and his hon. Friends were committed to the cause of decentralisation. I have two points to make. First, I do not think that that is supported by the record, although we will not debate that at any length, because to do so would not commend itself to you, Mr. O'Brien. Secondly, I appeal to the Minister not to cloak a regulatory burden for business in the language of freedom and autonomy for local councils. It is no great freedom or worthwhile autonomy for different local authorities to be able to use different standard forms. They would have to be a bunch of pretty sad anoraks if they derived any pleasure from the capacity to apply different procedures throughout the country. They would have to be even sadder anoraks, which I am sure that they are not, to derive any pleasure from applying different requirements or differently composed forms to different businesses in the same area. That has nothing to do with local authority discretion. That is over-zealous, thoroughly burdensome and deeply unjustified regulation of businesses. What is more, as I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield will agree, even in local authority terms, that is rank inefficiency, and there is no reason why we should have to put up with it.