New Clause 5
Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [Lords]
2:15 pm
Lorely Burt (Shadow Minister, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Solihull, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The new clause would broaden the scope of the suggested inspection plans to enable the primary authorities to publish a broad range of information about businesses that would be of benefit to other local authorities when exercising their functions. Furthermore, it would remove the bureaucracy associated with such plans by removing the requirements for written notifications and justifications if, for any reason, a local authority needs to carry out an inspection in response to local circumstances that fall outside the approach detailed in the published plan.
Clause 30 would have limited value in helping local authorities effectively co-ordinate and target their enforcement activities. It focuses only on planned inspections, which are only a small part of the regulatory work of regulators. The new clause allows for the publication of information that is far more useful to councils and enables regulated persons or entities to get information to all councils about safeguard systems and planned improvements. The clause would also fetter local authorities’ ability to respond at a local level to local issues, and it would add a level of bureaucracy that ultimately has no impact.
The new clause would still require a local authority to have regard to any published compliance plan, but it would remove the requirement for it to notify and justify to a primary authority why it acted in a way that did not fall within a published plan. It adds no value for a primary authority to stop another local authority acting outside the plan. A regulated person or entity has the right to complain via a local authority’s complaints procedure and, if necessary, via the independent local government ombudsman or judicial review if it considers that a local council has acted inappropriately.
If a primary authority can set out in the plan how often inspections should take place, I am concerned that the plan will lack the flexibility to deal with the very situation to which Lord Jones referred in another place. I cite the example of inspectors at the Tesco store at Olive avenue, Coventry, which is not a million miles away from my constituency. They undertook five inspections of the store, four of which were in response to customer complaints, and alleged that food was on sale past its use-by date. In total, 142 items of food were found available for sale past their use-by date. Despite alerting both branch managers and Tesco head office on each and every occasion, the failings within the store were not rectified. By the fourth visit, the situation was getting worse and officers discovered 73 items on sale past their use-by date, including 11 that were 10 days past it.
The point of the story is that Tesco began its submissions by apologising to the court for its failings and attempting to argue that its due diligence system was good, even though it accepted that it had not been correctly implemented this time. It argued that the failings were due to human error and placed the blame on the store manager. Clearly, the court decided otherwise, and Tesco was eventually fined £133,400 with £8,976 in costs. The point is that the local store failed to act on what was an acceptable company policy. In such cases, the primary authority could not be expected to know as well as the local authority which local stores were failing to comply with company policy. It could therefore set an inspection regime based on the assumption that a nationally agreed process was being implemented everywhere. As a result, a local authority might be prevented from undertaking inspections at a store that was not living up to national standards, and nothing would be done until an outbreak of food poisoning or, in a different type of environment, an accident.