Orders of the Day — Trade, Industry and Deregulation

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:07 pm on 24 November 1993.

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Photo of Tony Wright Tony Wright , Cannock and Burntwood 8:07, 24 November 1993

My mind turns, as it often does, to the Conservative party's 1979 election manifesto, a perennially interesting document. I was distracted, when reading it, by sentences such as: Value Added Tax does not apply, and will not be extended, to necessities like food, fuel, housing and transport. Ploughing on, however, I found at the beginning of the first paragraph: This election is about the future of Britain—a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources—in coal"— I could not read beyond that point and continue to take the manifesto entirely seriously.

This week, the miners of Littleton colliery, most of whom live in my constituency—they were told a matter of months ago that they worked in a core pit and had a future in the coal industry that had been carved out, or the remains of it, in the coal review—were informed that their pit would close in the first week in December. I met them the other night. They said, "What more can we do? We are prepared to work in the public sector or the private sector. We have done everything and more that anyone has ever asked of us. You said that we were a core pit; now you say that we have no future." Five hundred men and their families, and a whole community, are affected. I simply pass that on to whoever might listen. There might still be somebody who is prepared to give people like that the kind of chance they have asked for.

I will address most of my remarks to deregulation. The context in which we have to consider it is, quite simply, the growth of Government. Again turning to the 1979 manifesto, it says: 'The traditional role of our legislature has suffered badly from the growth of Government over the last quarter of a century.We will see that Parliament and no other body stands at the centre of the nation's life and decisions, and we will seek to make it effective in its job of controlling the Executive. Then there is more about the attack on over-Government, regulations and bureaucracy.

What have we had? We have had the biggest growth in Government in modern times. We are now having to deregulate because the Government have invented the regulatory state; everything that they have touched they have sought to regulate. The whole thrust of the Government's privatisation programme has produced massive regulator strictures—most recently with the privatisation of British Rail. Those strictures were replicated across the whole range of utilities, and are to be replicated in the education system—"Death by ringbinder" as it has been called in the profession. I will not refer to what has been happening inside the health service, where managers, bureaucrats and accountants multiply by the day.

There is a sensible approach to all this. I prefer good regulations to bad ones; simple ones to complex ones; and sensible ones to silly ones. There are many regulations that the business community would like to see but the Government have not delivered. One that has been mentioned in the debate is late payment problems for small businesses. Small business men have been pressing the Government to do something about that, and it would be a sensible regulation to introduce.

Regulation has become the hallmark of the Government. The Department of Trade and Industry's report on the implementation and enforcement of European Community law in the United Kingdom, shows that both Government and officials are largely responsible for the problems that we have. Failure properly to integrate EC directives with domestic legislation has produced a maze, and it is that maze that the Government are now trying to sort out.

We have seen the development of the extended state, the regulatory state, the contract state, the market tested state and the quango state. Soon, by the end of this Government, that will account for almost a quarter of public expenditure, tripling the number of quangos that Mrs. Thatcher, in her great quango cull, was going to get rid of. That is the crime of regulatory regime that the Government have created.

The volume of legislation introduced by the Government is telling, and is a backcloth to everything that we are doing today. Since 1979, the total number of Acts passed was 861; the average number of Acts passed each year is 61·3. The total number of pages is 29,811; the average number of pages per year is 2,466. The total number of statutory instruments is 33,382; the average number per year is 2,335. The total number of SI pages is 70,088; the average number per year is 7,008.