Examination of witnesses (Questions 40
- 52)
TUESDAY 30 JUNE 1998
MR CHRISTOPHER
HASKINS, MR
GEORGE KIDD
and SALLY PICKLES
Mr Letwin
40. I would like to take you back to the
remarks you were making about the Working Time Directive. In your
opening remarks you mentioned that you were concerned with the
question of whether we were relieving the public from old, UK
regulations as corresponding and overlapping European regulations
came in. Is it part of the work of the Task Force to look in principle
at each area where the Government is intending to regulate because
a directive has come upon us? If you do look at those, how do
you introduce into the process of the European Select Committee
and the European Standing Committee and so on for parliamentary
inspection your views on potential regulation to match European
directives? If I could just add one remark, if you are doing that,
then this is somehow failing entirely to come through to those
of us who sit on these Standing Committees. In a year of sitting
on European Standing Committee B I do not think I have ever heard
a reference to your Task Force, and now you have made these remarks
and it occurs to me that that is an immensely important role that
you might be performing. My question really is therefore aimed
at whether you think it is one that the Task Force with its current
composition and part-time nature is actually capable of putting
or whether a separate Task Force would be necessary or whether
this is something which the Unit is going to take on, or what.
(Mr Haskins) It is all about resource. Obviously
the Task Force is very limited in what it can do. What we have
done in the European thing is that we have had various discussions
with the Austrians about our work and shown them what we have
done. I have been to Vienna to discuss our approach to regulation
with them. They are having a better regulation thing of their
own in October which I am going to speak at. We have talked to
the Germans about it to try and get the culture. Of course we
have some huge cultural differences when we talk to the Germans
about it because a German cannot live without regulation. To deny
him regulation is to deny him bread and butter. One has got a
problem there. The summit in Cardiff a fortnight ago it seemed
to me was raising some interesting questions about applying regulations
more intelligently, and the question of subsidiarity which arises
particularly on that is how much of this European regulation is
really relevant at a European level and how much of it can be
brought down to local level. Specifically the only area that we
have got involved in with a bit of discretion is on the metric
avoirdupois argument. I think we have fluffed it a bit. It is
a classic example where we as better regulators should be saying
that whatever else we should be going for metric and not make
life too complicated. The Government is making it very confused.
It has not made up its mind either way. I think we have ended
up with something which says that every citizen should be able
to have metric and avoirdupois in front of them at every point.
I think this may be a satisfactory interim arrangement but long
term metrication is going to be the route.
Mr King
41. After we are dead!
(Mr Haskins) Yes. But this is what all these people,
Anita Roddick and all, are terribly concerned about. One of the
things the Government has got to stop doing is patronising people.
To assume that every old person in the world is not able to work
things out for themselves——I am amazed how people
do work things out. A classic example of that was the BSE situation.
The BSE crisis arose two years ago and all sorts of risks and
dangers were talked about and people immediately reacted and stopped
eating beef for a day or two, but very quickly people worked out
their own solutions and one of the things I am interested in is
the "nanny state" situation. I do not think to have
a national register of nannies is going to make any sense at all,
just the way I do not think it makes any sense to have 850,000
licences covering everybody who is producing food so that every
Women's Institute, when they make a cake for a fete on a Saturday
afternoon will not be able to make a cake without going and getting
a licence. You ask an enforcer about that. I make pies and some
of the pies I make, which are sold outside Old Trafford on a Saturday
afternoon—through third parties, I should say—may
not be entirely refrigerated to the umpteenth degree, but I would
argue that the recipients of those pork pies, who may have had
several pints of beer, are going to be able to deal with those
pork pies without any difficulty. If you put those same pies in
the same environment into an old people's home you will have problems.
The issue of targeting comes into the thing when you are introducing
regulations that apply right across the piece in public safety.
Another bit of targeting is rail safety. You remember the terrible
accident that took place in Paddington nine months ago. There
was quite a lot of pressure from people saying, "The Germans
have a safer rail system"—haha. As you know, we do
not have an automatic signalling system. It is a pretty good one;
it has been there for a hundred years. But everybody said, "Let
us have the German system." Our system costs, I think I am
allowed to say, an estimated three million pounds for a life saved.
The German system put on their private line would be £18
million for a life saved. If you put the German system on that
Cardiff line, the operator of the train says, "This is rather
expensive. Put the fares up." Everybody jumps into cars,
gets on to the M4, comes up to London, and ten times as many people
are killed. There is a balance. These are very difficult issues
for Ministers to explain. I can make comments like that but it
is no skin off my nose if they disown me, but these are issues
which are public issues which really Parliament has to take into
account before rushing to make responses to public calamities.
There is always a natural instinct to respond to a public calamity
that way. The Lyme Bay boating accident was a classic example
of it, where regulations were introduced. There was no need for
them because the law itself dealt with the problem and somebody
went to gaol as a result of it. But as a result of the regulation
a lot of Outward Bound activities, which are perfectly healthy
cultural things, were put outside the law, and we just have to
be careful.
Mr Letwin
42. Is it the case that when the Government
is contemplating a regulation to implement a directive, you do
not in the normal course of events look at that and comment on
it?
(Mr Haskins) The Prime Minister is keen that we
do get an opportunity to do that. He is keen that he has an opportunity
to do it. It is part of the wide complexity of Government to be
able to have an early warning look at the thing. There is the
issue of transparency. Take beef on the bone. The moment there
is a problem the public will understand if, when you ask the Minister
of Agriculture to make an instant response to it, he responds,
whereas if you say, "Let us keep it quiet and look at this
internally for two or three months", people do not feel happy
about that. The answer to it is I think to assume that people
are intelligent and say, "Right; here is the evidence. We
are going to look at this. We are not going to make up our minds
about this for two or three months, and then we will make up our
minds having consulted properly." In my view that would have
been the proper way to deal with the beef on the bone issue.
(Mr Kidd) Chairman, I could offer a couple of
comments, again on the process. It comes back to the concept that
if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day. From the Unit's
point of view we try and work with departments. We do not seek
to be Whitehall's police force, but we seek to give the right
tools to our colleagues to get the right deals to the extent that
one can within multilateral negotiation, and to give them the
right tools then in terms of how you go about implementing the
European Directives so that you do not double bank, as we would
define this, you do not gold plate unintentionally, as we define
it. There are some obvious examples where historically it seems
that we have and some examples currently where we have chosen
not to. I think introducing the Data Protection Bill rather than
trying to graft the European Data Protection Directive on to the
existing Data Protection Act is probably a case in point. The
Task Force, in its report on consumer affairs, in addition to
metrication looked at weights and measures law where we have not
simply implemented the European Weights and Measures Directives,
two or three, which run to about a dozen pages, but back in whenever
it was interpreted those and decided what we thought it was that
the community meant and wrote over a hundred pages of procedure.
That was one of the things where the Task Force, looking at consumer
law, said, "You do not need this. It is actually perverse.
You have the counter effect, which is that people cannot understand
what is being asked of them. You do not keep the right records
and do not focus on the things that actually matter within that
process." I hope as a mixture of system and selective observation
we get through the worst of these.
Mr Stewart
43. My questions are really about the approach
of the Task Force. I am particularly interested in this balancing
act that you mentioned earlier. Can you give the Committee some
idea of how you select areas of legislation to examine?
(Mr Haskins) Obviously we look at anything new
that the Government is proposing. One of the things you do learn
is that the critical element is to get the regulation right first
time round. That is the most important thing of all. New legislation
is thought out properly because once it is on the statute book—that
is what you are here for—it is extremely difficult to get
it off. We will comment either in short by the consultation process
on any significant piece of new legislation coming out, of which
there are many and there will continue to be many. That is the
first point. The second approach is running sores: issues of continuous
concern. We get a lot of people who are very unhappy about the
way the charities are regulated and so we felt that because we
get a lot of pressure from people about that we should look at
it. Licensing is another running sore which we think we should
probe. The first one is themes which are continuously coming to
us. The issue of small business exemptions: we are always aware
of that. The issue of Europe: we have to take account of that.
There are about four or five themes cross-cutting interdepartmental
ones. Any particular piece of legislation which has that sort
of background I am interested in. What I am not interested in
is the Task Force second-guessing Departments. In a way, if we
do our job properly the Departments get it right in the first
instance within their own area. In the long term I am not interested
in a regulation which applies just to MAFF. Ideally MAFF should
be able to establish their own way of dealing with it. Okay; they
have to be audited, but to second-guess MAFF is not what we should
be about. Where it gets interesting is where they get the cross-departmental
issues which have to be balanced up and where different objectives
may be pursued by different Departments. I think there is no difficulty
in picking an agenda with this rather busy Government.
44. When in your opening statement you talked
about bringing conflicting interests together you may be aware
of course that one of the criteria against which the Deregulation
Committee assesses deregulation proposals and draft orders is
the question of necessary protection. In the list of tests of
good regulation and the leaflet "The Principles of Good Regulation"
are included balancing, often contradictory, objectives such as
food safety and food supply. How do you approach a judgement as
to whether regulation does maintain that balance?
(Mr Haskins) One point is you consult the people
who are at the extremes of the balance so that if you take the
food issue you consult the Consumer Association, and one of the
interesting points that I am dealing with in regard to pressure
groups is whom they are accountable to, their democratic legitimacy.
One has to be very careful. You know more than I do that one distinguishes
between those who have got some legitimacy and those whose claims
are spurious. Broadly speaking it is fair to say that most consumer
pressure groups have got at the moment at any rate the issue of
safe food slightly ahead of affordable food, so therefore you
go to some of the social pressure groups if you like who are interested
in diet in parts of Glasgow where all the evidence is that affordable
nutritious food is rather more important than bacteriologically
safe food, and then you listen to them and you make a judgement.
I do not see how else one can do it. One has to be guided by the
principles. If the principles we have set down there do not stand
up and do not test on the principle of proportionality, then we
may change the principle. We do keep coming back to the five principles,
which are consistency, transparency, targeting, proportionality
and accountability. All the time we robotically keep saying these
things to Ministers and saying, "Are you meeting those requirements?"
(Mr Kidd) Perhaps I could just add, Chairman,
that the pass then does in a sense move to the Unit and to the
Government to say in that case to the Ministry of Agriculture
and the Department of Health. in our toolmaker role, here is a
guide on better regulation. Here is how you should go about consolidating.
Here is how specifically you should conduct the regulatory impact
assessment. Here is how you should try and identify the risk,
the alternative ways of dealing with the risks and the costs and
benefits of each of those options in coming up with what seems
the most proportionate response. It is going to depend case by
case on the degree of certainty, whether there is an issue of
scientific certainty or whether there is an issue of hard evidence.
(Mr Haskins) The BSE thing is a shadow over our
total approach because it is all about regulation. It is affected
by public perceptions. If the public perception of Government
processes of regulation, and that includes scientific advice and
all that sort of stuff, is low, then you tend to get an over-reaction
and you get an over-regulatory demand from the public. I think
we are in an over-regulatory state of mind at the moment because
of the BSE crisis. We have got to get that back into balance.
In order to get that back into balance we have to restore public
credibility in the Government's regulatory process and that will
not be done overnight. That is one of my main objectives, to help
in that process.
Mr Randall
45. You were talking about liquor licensing.
I was just wondering whether, with a set of regulations that has
been built up over centuries, you might at some stage think it
is going to be impossible to deregulate or to look at better regulation
on that. Is it within the remit of your Task Force actually to
suggest to the Government to look at primary legislation, start
again if you like?
(Mr Haskins) It is, but whether they would listen
to us would be another question. Licensing appears to me to be
an area that politicians generally do not want to get into. The
enforcers though are very dissatisfied, as you know, with the
arrangements with the police if you take the ridiculous element
about entertainment, that you drink up till 11 o'clock as long
as you are not eating, but if you start eating you can continue
drinking, and if you make a noise, what is the rule about playing
a band after 11 o'clock?
(Mr Kidd) Then you have got to have entertainment
but you cannot have more than two entertainers.
(Mr Haskins) There is also the area where Government
is getting involved I think, and which I think is going to be
quite interesting, in the area of social disturbance and noise,
which is a very genuine public concern. Again it is full of regulatory
problems and of course the issue of children and the supervision
of children, what children should do late at night. The enforcers
view this with some concern.
Mr Stewart
46. As I have already said, this Deregulation
Committee has several criteria against which it assesses draft
proposals.
(Mr Haskins) Better Regulation.
47. I am talking about this Deregulation
Committee.
(Mr Haskins) Perhaps you should change your name
too.
48. It has been thought about. We are ahead
of the game. One of the other criteria is cost. The Deregulation
Committee seeks to assess the cost savings consequent on deregulation
proposals. Does the Task Force look to reduce cost burdens and,
if it does, how reliably can such cost savings be estimated?
(Mr Haskins) Obviously affordability is a huge
element in regulation, and in particular the area of public safety.
Ministers are loath to talk about it. There has to be a trade-off
between what we can afford and what we would like. It is part
of our criteria to do this. The Department are meant to be doing
this all the time themselves. It is for you to judge whether the
criteria they use are convincing criteria. There seem to me to
be an awful lot of claims about savings made by the previous Deregulation
Committee which I would like to revisit and see if they had been
tested in practice. I have to keep reminding you: we are a very
part-time Task Force and we hit things in a somewhat haphazard
way, but the principle of affordability and cost saving has been
built into the system for some time.
49. What about the last part of the question?
How reliably can you estimate cost savings?
(Mr Kidd) The answer there has to be that it will
vary case by case. If I am speaking first wearing a Task Force
hat, the focus is very much on the principles. The first thing
the Task Force has to look at is the specific policy areas. It
uses the principles as a template and tests the adequacy and the
robustness of the legislation against the template rather than
to say, "Here is liquor licensing. How can we save £50
million?" or, "What does it cost?", which might
be an Exchequer view of the whole process. During the work we
could for example seek to validate those where we could assess
the impact of something which we have identified as being potentially
disproportionate; having a perverse effect. I am reminded by the
Chairman that when the Task Force was reporting on consumer affairs,
another European Directive that the DTI is having to implement
is on unit pricing, the concept not only of the price of the goods
but the price of the biscuits per hundred grams. You are used
to seeing it if you walk round the supermarket but they currently
do it voluntarily. The Unit Pricing Directive extended that requirement
to a wider range of goods, made it mandatory, but left Government
some discretion in terms of which businesses, ie. whether small
businesses need meet the requirements of that Directive. In that
case the Task Force was able to find research done by the pharmacy
sector saying, "It is going to cost us X per shop per thousand
items to manually work and re-price. It is very simple for Sainsbury's
to take the computer and flick the switch and get the new price.
It is not for the corner pharmacy or for the corner greengrocer
or whatever." We were able to take those figures, extrapolate
them to the wider retail sector, and say, "Look, the potential
impact of this on small retailers may be of the order of £70
million. You as a Government have to decide because you have this
discretion: do you want to exercise a discretion? Do you want
to use the exemption or do you not? What is the balance you want
to strike between public information and the price per hundred
grams of biscuits and the potential perverse effect which is losing
local community shops in the communities that most rely on those
shops for the people that most rely on local shops and do not
drive to the supermarket?"
(Mr Haskins) It is a classic example of consumers
always saying on the one hand they want smaller shops kept locally,
but on the other hand they then say they want regulation to protect
consumers, which actually disadvantages smaller shops at the expense
of the large shops. You cannot have it both ways. The other cost
I should mention, and the Treasury takes great interest in this
as you can imagine, is that the Treasury likes to keep things
away from taxation on to direct consumer consumption. That is
why it wants the Food Standards Agency funded through a licensing
process because that licensing process effectively means that
the consumer would pay as opposed to the taxpayer paying, so there
is a tension there. The Treasury more legitimately has got an
interest in regulation and the way it affects the workings of
the economy. They get very frustrated because they can control
public expenditure, they can control taxes, but sometimes regulation
has a perverse way of impacting unfavourably on the economy and
the Treasury is baffled as to how they can get control of that.
There is a definite macro-economic factor to regulation which
is not satisfactorily dealt with.
Mr Chaytor
50. Can I bring the issue back to the point
you raised at the very start which was concerning the autonomy
or even the obstructiveness of individual Departments and ask
you to comment generally on how you find individual Departments
responding to the better regulation drive? I would ask you to
say what you think is the best way to persuade or coerce Departments
into acting more corporately and also comment on this question
of redundant legislation. Later this morning we are meeting some
colleagues from Australia and it was interesting that their committee
structure includes a committee called the Redundant Legislation
Committee. There must be a considerable amount of legislation
from the 19th century or earlier as well as wartime legislation
on the statute book that simply needs eliminating. Again, what
is the best way we can get to grips with this rather than just
leave it to the vagaries of individual Departments?
(Mr Haskins) I can answer the first question more
easily than the second one. Generally, as you would expect, certain
Departments respond to the approach better than others. This comes
down to the human factor. Those who appear to me to have greater
self-confidence are able to take on this process. Those Departments
which feel under pressure or Ministers who feel under pressure
are more suspicious and therefore there are some histories of
some great Departments who shall be nameless who have been laws
unto themselves in this area and that culture is changing. My
predecessor, Francis Maude, tended to have a sort of Court of
Star Chamber where he got the Departments in and put them under
pressure. I am more inclined to do it by sweet reasonableness
and saying, "Look; this seems to me the commonsense way of
dealing with things. Do you not agree?" and for the most
part we are getting somewhere on that. It is obviously early days
and it very much depends on the amount of interest that we get
from the centre, from the Prime Minister, on this if we are going
to get Departments to respond to this, and indeed your own activities.
At the moment, as I understand it, the onus is on the Departments
to come to you and say, "Would you please help us to get
rid of redundant regulation?" and they are loathe to do that
because they fear they are going to lose valuable parliamentary
time which they will be using to bring in even more regulations
and there is that sort of trade-off on it. All I can say is that
I have registered the point with the Prime Minister who does seem
interested in the issue and I hope that he has asked the Chancellor
to look at this issue and I hope that there will be more pressure
on Departments as time goes on to make you much busier than you
may appear to be at the present time in terms of unfinished work.
Chairman: Has any
member any other question he or she would like to ask?
Mrs Lait
51. Can I ask a quick question which has
rather come to the fore recently, and that is the whole issue,
which you have looked at, of childcare. Does your report on childcare
look at all the varying different ages of consent? The Childrens
Act goes up to 18, and of course you can get married when you
are 16. This was a debate which we had the other day. Have you
been asked to look at that, or have you looked at that?
(Mr Haskins) We have looked at it. We do not get
asked to look at anything, we have been making our own agenda.
So we have looked at that. I am not entirely sure what to say
about it.
(Mr Kidd) We did look at it. There are two points
on childcare. The first is that it really is about childcare—that
is, the relationship between children in pre-school years, school
education, public education and public childcare, and independent
or for-profit provision (the nurseries, the babysitters, the role
of the nannies and so on), rather than the government work on
children's care homes and other things of that nature. The report
which comes out, I think, on 7 July does address issues about
particularly the over- and under-eights issue, not so much about
16-year-olds. Going back to the fundamentals of why do you have
regulation, what is the issue you are trying to address, certainly
one of the risks or one of the factors in taking a risk is a child's
capacity to express his or her satisfaction or dissatisfaction,
or fear, about an environment situation. I think the task force
does observe that certainly once you get to over-eight-year-olds
there is something of a consensus that children there are in more
of a position and feel more empowered to speak up than with a
child of three or four. So in that sense it begins to address
and it begins to recognise that you can deal with the same risk,
the same hazard, in a different way. You may not need to regulate
all the supervision in the same way for 12- and 13-year-olds and
after-school clubs, for instance, that you would for three- and
four-year-olds in pre-school.
Chairman
52. Thank you. That concludes the questions
we have for you, Mr Haskins. I wonder if there is any final point
you would like to make, anything you think we have missed asking
you which you would like to make a point about before we close
the session?
(Mr Haskins) No, I think it has been very helpful
for me. It may be possible that we can perhaps co-ordinate our
efforts more than we have done in the past and meet again, particularly
after the Whitsun review, to see where the Government are going
to put this sort of activity on the agenda and maybe see if our
respective roles need adjusting appropriately.
Chairman: Thank you
very much. Can I thank you and your colleagues for coming along.
I think it has been useful to us today. We ultimately hope to
produce some report which hopefully will help the Government to
go along the line. The two things—better regulation and
deregulation—seem at some points to clash, but I think that
obviously the Government was spelling out a clear message when
it set up your unit as the better regulation unit. We hope that
we have a lot of things in common, and we hope that we can help
the Government to move along, because there are obviously a number
of things which it will be in the national interest to move along
in that direction. Therefore, can I thank you very much for coming
along this morning. It has been very useful to us.
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