New Clause 5
Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [Lords]
2:30 pm
Pat McFadden (Minister of State (Employment Relations and Postal Affairs), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Wolverhampton South East, Labour)
I thank the Committee for the way in which our business has been conducted over the past couple of days. In particular, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford for the questions that he put to me on clause 65—it was a welcome and enlightening intervention. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley, who serves on the Regulatory Reform Committee, for bringing her expertise to our deliberations. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North kept us in line in regard to Scottish law and gave us some legal advice, which I think in former life might have cost us a great deal more. Her help was extremely valuable. I resisted the attempts by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud to divert us into a discussion on the merits or otherwise of two-tier and single-tier local government. I would like to thank all my other hon. Friends for their contributions.
I thank the hon. Member for Solihull, who has been labouring under extreme sickness—from the sound of her coughing—and I hope that she gets well soon. She moved a number of amendments, and raised a number of issues, that were also raised in another place. They are important issues, and we take them very seriously. Of course, I also thank the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford, who has probed and occasionally pressed with great skill and courtesy, for the way in which he has conducted the debate on the Bill and his amendments. I am conscious that there are a couple of points on which I have said that I will write to him, and I have not forgotten those.
Finally, of course, I wish to thank you, Mr. Chope, for your skilful, impartial and enlightening guidance in getting us through the Bill over the last couple of days. This is, as the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford said, an important Bill, if a technical one. In all the discussion of the individual clauses and amendments, we should not lose sight of the aims, which, as I have said, are to tackle the two problems of inconsistency and inflexibility in the current regulatory regime. If we manage to do that, we have done a significant service to the general public, to those who are regulated, and we will also have saved business in the country a significant sum of money—an estimated sum of up to £200 million—in regulatory costs. That is important because we want business to concentrate on the business of doing business, rather than the kind of costs that can hopefully be reduced by legislation such as this.