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Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [Lords]
12:00 pm
Mark Prisk (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Hertford and Stortford, Conservative)
I am grateful to the Minister for agreeing to provide us with that report, not least because one of my questions was how prescriptive such a list would be. Clearly, the Minister is ahead of the legislation.
I agree that clause 11 is important, but will the Minister say where there could be dilemmas? In particular, if a local authority has chosen to focus on a particular problem in its area, why should the LBRO interfere, and how would it do so? That question would certainly be asked by some of our constituents.
Let us take, for example, Wolverhampton, given that it is familiar to the Minister. If the good burghers of Wolverhampton felt that sorting out bad licensees was their No. 1 priority, how would the requirement to “have regard to” a national list work? Who resolves whether or not Wolverhampton is completely ignoring the aforementioned list of lists because it is determined to resolve bad licensees? How does Wolverhampton allocate its resources to square the circle that the Minister described? On the one hand, it must be able to deal with the problems that it faces in its own area and, on the other, to “have regard to” what would clearly be national priorities. Who resolves such a conflict?