Examination of witnesses (Questions 20
- 25)
TUESDAY 28 APRIL 1988
THE RT
HON DR
DAVID CLARK,
MP, MR
GEORGE KIDD
and MR PHILIP
BOVEY
Mr Letwin
20. I want to move on to something which
you have already alluded to but we have not discussed it in detail.
You mentioned at a relatively early stage in your remarks—and
I took down a roughly accurate quotation—that you were absolutely
dependent on other departments coming forward with proposals.
I think we all have some considerable sympathy with your plight
in that and we are also all of us worried about the paucity of
what is coming forward and my question really is how can we help
to accelerate the process of proposals coming forward? Would it,
for example, be helpful, if it were appropriately co-ordinated
with your unit, if we were to call departments one by one to give
evidence and try to ferret out from them aspects of the regulation
over which they preside that may not meet with general approval.
And, I apologise if I slide over territory others may wish to
expand on, would it also be helpful if we were to interview outside
bodies that suffer from improper or excessive regulation and try
to ascertain what measures they would like to see implemented?
My general question therefore is, how can we co-operate with you
to make departments come forward with a wider array of sensible
measures?
(Dr Clark) Anything which raises the awareness
of the work of this Committee, especially in government departments,
I think has to be welcomed. I would not even attempt to suggest
what you do. I would think that possibly an early meeting with
Mr Haskins might be profitable. I think you would find that interesting
and whatever you decide thereafter is a matter for this Committee.
But I think your work is very well worth doing and I apologise
to you that you have not had as much work emanating from Government
as I would wish. That is partly the nature of the law of diminishing
returns and also new ministers coming in and learning what there
is to do, and, of course, if you try to make an assessment of
manifesto commitments against the reality of the situation. I
hope we have turned that round now. I believe we have and we have
quite a lot of work between now and the summer recess for this
Committee to do and then we have a programme developing for after
the summer recess as well. I think we have actually got over the
hump, we have got over the difficulties, but we have to keep up
the momentum and I think the Committee—it is up to you—might
want to look at itself about its original parent Act.
Mr Steen
21. Chancellor, may I give you a view which
may not fit exactly with what has been said. You could take a
view that under deregulation the easy ones were done by the last
administration and you are really moving into the difficult areas
and that perhaps you could concentrate on how officialdom is interpreting
regulation at the local authority level and at county level and
in the government departments because it strikes me that that
really would be more productive than worrying about us doing more
work here. It is very kind of you to be concerned about us not
doing enough. There are lots of other things we can do and if
we go into mothballs for three months or six months that, to me,
would not matter so much as actually getting officials—and
I am thinking of my own district and county councils; the problems
really are there and also MAFF and it is a culture change—to
think in a helpful way. Again they have their problems because
they can be criticised by their superiors for not enforcing the
regulations and I think that is the area which really could be
very productive.
(Dr Clark) Could I very briefly respond to that.
I very much agree with that. One needs to get a new attitude at
the point of enforcement. I was very much struck in the United
States where Vice President Gore has done so much work in this
respect, whereby when it came to factories and their equivalent
of the Factories Act, there had to be a poster up at every place
of work identifying what the obligations were and, of course,
we see the same in this country as well. The position was that
if there was not a poster up there was a statutory fine imposed—I
think it was $200—and the effectiveness of the enforcer
was based on how many $200 he collected, which was completely
against the outcome which one is always trying to achieve. They
did a lot of work in the United States and they have now got an
agreement where, if they see there is not a poster up, the first
couple of times they actually say, "Here's a poster, put
it up," and if they have not got it up the third time, they
are in real trouble, and that is the sort of approach I think
we need. With that in mind we have a working party led by my Department
with other departments called Access Business and we are working
with the local authorities to have a concordat on enforcement.
We have actually launched this and we think that we are going
to make progress with that. Some very exciting things are being
done by some local authorities. Indeed, I would say that probably
local government are doing it better than central government,
but what I am trying to do is to expand best practice because
some of the best practices that we are using in Britain, we are
ahead of the world. I am sure that some of the attitudes are equally
wrong as well. There are always going to be problems, we always
know that. It is not an easy world, but by trying to do it voluntarily
through a concordat we believe that is the right way forward.
So we are now concentrating on the sort of theme we have been
talking about.
22. And you could look at the running of
the Fees Office of the House of Commons. They send out bits of
paper. We have to stick something on the wall in our offices for
our secretaries to read and, of course, the other area to look
at is fire regulations. The Home Office has a Fire Department
looking at the Palace of Westminster and we have our own Fire
Department and every year all the officials change and come up
with new regulations and interpretation. That is a very productive
area!
(Dr Clark) I think something called ultra vires
might well come in but I do not know.
Chairman
23. May I raise one technical point whilst
you are here, Chancellor. The Committee in both this House and
in the House of Lords—we are now allowed to call it the
House of Lords, are we not, by the Modernisation Committee report?—has
often found that there has been no up-to-date, complete version
of the legislation that we are amending available. Could you give
any indication of the progress in establishing electronic statutes
in force? How are we getting on with that, because it has been
a problem in the past because we have not known exactly what we
are dealing with?
(Dr Clark) Yes. Again I was somewhat at a loss
on this. In fact, I know am at a loss. This is the responsibility
of the Lord Chancellor's Department and, therefore, it is not
my business in a sense, but I will write to the Lord Chancellor,
I will get an answer and I will pass it back on to you.
24. Thank you very much. Have I missed any
Member who wants to ask anything? Chancellor, may I thank you
very much for coming along this morning. I think it has been extremely
useful to the Committee and I hope also that you and your Department
found it useful and that it does mean that the message that we
do want to get across is that we want, and I accept the Government
wants, to see better regulation. We want to see us get rid as
a nation of unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy that is blocking
us in some ways. We do recognise that you cannot just scrap everything.
You have to have sensible regulation. We thank you for coming
along and I hope it has been useful, as I say, to your Department
as well as to this Committee.
(Dr Clark) Mr Pike, thank you for that. May I
make one final point and it is simply this. I hope it is useful.
I found it very useful. If, in fact—and I think it probably
has to be done through you as the Chairman—you feel at any
time you want to discuss any of these issues—factual issues
obviously, not the politics of it—with any of my officials,
please feel free to ring Mr Kidd in the unit and we will certainly
do what we can to try and assist you.
25. Thank you very much for that. May I
also say—and I have to make it clear—that we will
be going through everything that has been said at this morning's
session because there have been a number of points that we would
wish to follow up. They are not issues that we have taken at this
session today to have printed and put on a shelf. There are a
number of important things that have come forward from what you
have said, Chancellor, and what Members have said that we really
need to look at as a Committee and take forward and there may
well be items on those themselves, even apart from other issues
in the future, that we need to come back and ask your Department
for views on. Thank you very much.
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