Clause 26
Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [Lords]
4:00 pm
Pat McFadden (Minister of State (Employment Relations and Postal Affairs), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Wolverhampton South East, Labour)
We spoke in this morning’s sitting about a situation in which one supermarket chain takes over another. The business could go to LBRO and say, for example, “We have been taken over by another group in another part of the country, so we think that the primary authority should no longer be local authority A, but local authority B.” That would be a perfectly rational thing to do. One would hope that LBRO would look kindly on such a situation. There are mechanisms whereby, for completely rational reasons, a business can say that it wants the primary authority to be changed. A similar circumstance could arise if a business moved its headquarters or principal centre of operations from north to south, for example. It would make sense for such a business to have a different primary authority relationship.
I am not saying that the arrangements should be frozen for ever once they are established, but there should be circumstances in which LBRO can say, “This is the relationship that we want to put together.” Under the amendment that the hon. Gentleman has proposed, the business could continually withdraw from primary authority relationships simply by giving notice, without the kind of reason that I have described. The danger is that we could have regulatory shopping around for the best deal, as it were, which I do not think would serve the Bill’s purpose.