Examination of Witnesses (Questions 69-79)
MR PHILIP
CULLUM, MR
STEVE BROOKER
AND MS
SARAH VEALE
29 APRIL 2008
Q69 Chairman: Unusually for this Place,
we are ahead of time. Perhaps we could make best use of the time
by asking you to introduce yourselves now, before we get on to
the formal questions.
Ms Veale: I am Sarah Veale, Head
of the Equality and Employment rights Department of the Trades
Union Congress.
Mr Cullum: I am Philip Cullum.
I am Acting Chief Executive of the National Consumer Council.
Mr Brooker: Steve Brooker. I lead
the NCC's work on regulation and consumer redress.
Q70 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Perhaps I could ask both organisations the same questions: What
do you think the BRE's role should be? Should it be that of a
policeman, think-tank, deliverer or teacher? Should the BRE concentrate
on developing one major strategic vision or should it pursue a
number of goals based on what is likely be a good use of its time?
Do you believe the BRE has a good grip on its own objectives?
We are asking questions similar to that of all our witnesses and
we are particularly interested in your answers.
Ms Veale: You suggested a combination
of teacher, policeman, think-tank, and I suppose that fairly accurately
sums up what their role is. I do not think there is anything particularly
wrong with that. I think it is quite useful to have a body that
combines those different mechanisms. I am not sure that I would
really particularly describe it as a think-tank. I have not seen
evidence of philosophical thought about the better regulation
process in any obviously detectable way, but I think that is something
that is needed in government. We do need an organisation that
is capable of seeing regulation as something that is done cross-government
and has a huge impact on all sorts of people. I think it is seen
as being the police by some other government departments. I am
not quite sure how that would work because I am not quite sure
what sanctions they can impose in the end. That would depend entirely
on how the Government see it and how seriously the Government
intend to take it. My answer would boil down to: It can do all
those things if it is given the support of the Government to do
them, but it is a little bit hard to see, certainly on the think-tank
point, how it has any serious role as a government think-tank
on regulation.
Q71 Chairman: Do I deduce from that
you think they perhaps ought to act as a think-tank?
Ms Veale: I am not sure they should.
In a sense I regret the demise of the Better Regulation Commission
which had a much clearer strategic role and encompassed a whole
range of different organisations who were represented on it. Of
course there is a successor body but that has a rather different,
though not entirely detached role. I think the BRE now has been
left on its own to an extent but also tucked into a particular
government department. I think it is probably still rather finding
its way.
Q72 Chairman: Do you think it should
concentrate on one strategic vision or pursue a number of goals?
Ms Veale: They are not mutually
exclusive. Any organisation like that should have a strategic
vision and I think that is what it is struggling with at the moment.
That is obviously going to be conditioned by political thinking
and where the Government want the whole thing to go, but, also,
it should have specific goals because within a strategy you need
to have markers and aims and objectives that you work towards.
Given that it is supposed to be pan governmental, you obviously
have to have nuanced goals to cope with different departments'
work. You cannot have a one-size-fits-all goal. You can have a
strategy but the goals themselves have to be far more bite-size
chunks and specific things to do. Different departments have different
records in terms of success with regulation and they have very
different types of regulation to administer and to produce. It
is very different doing work that regulates business from doing
work that regulates animal health or something: there is a connection
but the two things would require a very different goal-setting,
I would have thought.
Q73 Chairman: Leaving aside where
it fits in governmentand we will come on to that in a momentdo
you think it has a firm grip on its own objectives?
Ms Veale: I would like to think
it has. It strikes me, from the outside, as being a fairly self-confident
organisation. We see what they publish. I think it is early days
yet to assess how much of a grip they have on what are some relatively
different objectives now they have moved into a different department,
so I think it would be unfair of me at this early stage to comment
on that.
Q74 Chairman: Philip Cullum, would
you like to go through the same three areas?
Mr Cullum: Yes. In terms of the
role, I agree with Sarah's view that perhaps policeman is not
quite the right word, but we would agree with the idea of some
sort of internal audit function trying to encourage the right
kinds of culture and behaviour across government in terms of regulation
and developing a sophisticated understanding of what better regulation
is all about and how you create it. We see other roles for the
BRE, certainly holding the ring between both people like central
regulators and government departments, one of the things that
constantly surprises us as a generic consumer body is the extent
to which regulators do not seem to talk to each other. We are
aware of some fairly good things that regulators are doing at
times which other regulators are entirely unaware of and do not
seem to be learning from. I know there is a joint regulators group
for some of the sectoral regulators and economic regulators but
there still does not seem to be that sort of sharing. It would
be a real opportunity for the BRE to do it.
Q75 Chairman: Could you give an example
of what you mean?
Mr Cullum: Some of the examples
we seeand Steve my colleague is about to start work on
a project called Rating Regulators, where we are going to look
at seven regulators and see how effectively we think they are
doing the business for consumers. In terms of some of the things
we have already found: the way in which the Food Standards Agency
is very open in terms of its governanceand we are not aware
of any other regulator doing that; the extent to which the Financial
Services Authority has embraced the principles of taking a more
principles-based approach to regulation and Treating Customers
Fairly; some of the work from Ofcom on additional charges and
how they should be fair and transparentand I say again,
some of which is clearly applicable to other regulators but does
not seem to have been adopted by them; the Human Fertilisation
and Embryology Authority's fantastic programme of consumer engagement.
There are lots of quite good things going on but there still does
not seem to be that learning across the patch. We would not be
as pessimistic as Sarah on the think-tank. I am not sure I would
use the word "think-tank". Our paper talks about "ideas
entrepreneurship"which is perhaps a more pompous way
of saying think-tankbut, having worked with the BRE, we
do see signs of them trying to fulfil that role and doing it quite
successfully. Steve led, with the BRE, a project called Too Much
Information Can Harm, which was really about the way in which
regulators often use information requirements as a default approach
when, from a consumer perspective, sometimes the last thing you
need is another load of bumph. It is about trying to say: How
can we use information as a regulatory tool effectively? When
is it right to use it and when is it not right to use it? We drew
several things from that experience. One was the extent to which
the BRE was becoming a more open and collaborative organisation
but another was the extent to which they were rightly trying to
change the way that all sorts of regulators, both in government
departments and in sectors, think about how they regulate and
what are the most effective tools.
Q76 Chairman: A strategic vision,
or should it pursue a number of goals?
Mr Cullum: Clearly it does have
some sort of vision about what it thinks better regulation is
all about. How it then pursues that. I guess people running organisations
would say, "You have one vision but you may have a number
of goals beneath that which are consistent with the vision."
We would say that the goals are: trying to change some of the
culture; getting a better understanding of regulatory tools; opening
up more understanding about what better regulation means; developing
a real understanding of consumer and business behaviour and how
people will respond to particular types of regulation. That all
goes back to the vision of promoting better regulation. The issue
we haveand it perhaps relates to the point about where
it is based, so we will not go there just yetis whether
the integrity of the better regulation vision is being endangered
in some way through the rhetoric at the moment. Having gone from
a move, which we thought was correct, from deregulation into better
regulation, better regulation is being slightly changed into being
all about the business again. We feel the world moved on from
that a couple of years ago but there seems to be a slight move
backwards. It is not about saying, "Is it about one vision
or a number of goals?" but about trying to get some sort
of coherence or consistency.
Q77 Chairman: Does it have a firm
grip on its own objectives?
Mr Cullum: I think it has. We
have been quite impressed with working more closely with them
over the last couple of years. Particularly Jitinder Kohli when
he joined as Chief Executive has gradually tried to drive some
sort of culture change in the organisation, so I think it does
have a sense of what it is there for. But, subject to the comments
I made earlier, I think some of the political pressures it is
getting at the moment are not entirely consistent with what it
has done in terms of developing a more sophisticated approach
to better regulation.
Mr Brooker: We perhaps hear a
different message when we talk to civil servants on a day-to-day
basis than we hear from the ministers when they read their speeches
in Parliament and in the newspapers. One example I would give
on this concerns the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill.
That was introduced by the Minister and in the second reading
speech he mentioned businesses 56 times and consumers just once,
but this Bill is about improving the way consumer protection is
enforced locally and modernising the sanction and tool kit to
offer consumers better protection in the market-place. The rhetoric
we want to hear is how do you empower consumers to drive a competitive
market whilst minimising burdens on business rather than how can
you reduce the burdens on business while maintaining the necessary
consumer protections? There is a difference in emphasis there.
Chairman: We are going to move on to
where it belongs.
Q78 Judy Mallaber: Both organisations
have touched on this in your evidence. Can you expand a bit on
your views as to whether the move from the Cabinet Office to BERR
was a good, bad, or uncertain move, and, also, where within government
do you think the BRE should be placed in order to fulfil the better
regulation role most effectively?
Ms Veale: The first thing you
need to try to understand, I suppose, is why it was moved out
of the Cabinet Office. I still have not really understood why
that happened. Really, if you want a body that is going to have
that kind of rolling brief across all the other departments, it
made much more sense for it to be located quite firmly within
the centre. Going to BERR really did reinforce the TUC's worries
that the agenda really is being set by business. It is still about
de-regulation to an extent, really, if you scratch away, behind
the rhetoric. The worry is that, because it has been tucked into
a department at the same time as being renamed the Department
of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, you automatically
couple the regulatory reform part of the department with the business
and enterprise part and they become twins. Even if that were to
be a false fear, and in fact they were able to retain their roving
brief and it did not make any substantial difference, public perception
would be that the role of the Better Regulation Executive is to
ensure that business is not (as they keep telling us they are)
strangled with red tape. Certainly our dealings with the BRE have
been almost entirely on business-focused issues. In a sense, that
is understandable because we are the TUC and we are the other
side of business, if you like, but, on the other hand, that is
all they seem to spend their time doing. I have not really seen
a huge amount of evidence so far that they are spending as much
time or focusing as much on other aspects of society, of government
work, of government policy. They do seem to be obsessed with delivering
to the business agenda, and I think that has distorted what they
do. Also, as Philip said a little bit earlier, they tend to look
at other areas of work through the prism of how it is going to
affect business and business comes first and everything else comes
afterwards. It is hard to prove that is a direct result of their
being located in BERR but I can only say that it cannot conceivably
help. I think they are going to have to work extremely hard if
they are going to stay in BERR to establish themselves as a reputable
better regulation authority that is capable of understanding issues
that are outside the context of the concerns of particularly small
businesses. The short answer, I suppose, is there are some real
worries about it being located in BERR. I have not seen anything
yet to make me really confident that it is going to be able to
escape from that.
Mr Cullum: I suppose we want to
see it being in some sort of cross-cutting department, which has
some sort of leverage across the rest of government to try to
empower the BRE to influence behaviour right across government.
It is not obvious that BERR has that leverage particularly. If
you thought the only benefit for moving from a cross-cutting department
to a single department was if it was one that was incredibly powerful,
so that other bits of government quaked in their boots when that
department did something, that is not really a description of
what most people would use about BERR. We share Sarah's concern
about the self-confessed positioning of BERR as the department
for business. As I noticed from reading the transcript of your
previous session, our friends at the CBI miss no opportunity to
describe BERR as the "Department of Business" and they
miss out the "ERR" bit of the story, and it does seem
in small ways to have had a different effect on the BRE. Looking
at it positively, one might argue that the BRE will be a force
for good within BERR rather than BERR being a negative force on
the BRE, but looking at the BRE website this morning, on the front
page it says, "Life's too short to be bogged down by rules
and regulations. That is where the Better Regulation Executive
comes in. The bottom line: we make a positive difference to you
and your business" but that is not the whole better regulation
story. After that, it asks for suggestions for how better regulation
might work. One of the things we have argued for in the past is
that there are plenty of areas where consumers suffer from regulatory
burdens that should be swept away. The BRE, in its previous existence,
agreed with that, and so the website did change to encompass an
area for ideas from citizens, but the framing of that, if it were
not so serious, is slightly funny. There are now sections, so
that you click on a box as to whether you are private sector or
public sector or third sector or something described as "citizen
sector"which I think means peopleand then,
if you do that it, there are lots of questions which all ask about
the impact on "your organisation". As a member of the
public, I do not have an organisation: it is just me. The whole
framing is subtly rather business-focused and I do not think that
is helpful because it does not convey the texture of better regulation
which is about both the pros and cons of regulation, about the
extent to which burdens, as Sarah might argue, fall sometimes
on employees, and we would certainly say they sometimes fall on
the consumers.
Ms Veale: One example recently
is the Green Paper on the discrimination law reform. We are told
that the Better Regulation Executive has muscled in quite heavily
because it eels that a lot of the proposals in the Green Paper
would be a burden on business, but this particular piece of legislation
does not belong to that department and is set out to benefit society
in a much wider sense. I am not quite sure why the BRE feels that
it has to look at that particular piece of legislation, which
it has every right to do, but through the prism of how it is going
to impact on employers, because it is much, much wider. That is
a recent example of what I fear they see as their mission in the
new department.
Q79 Judy Mallaber: You have commented
that your connections are primarily about employment of business,
understandably, but has either organisation had any direct discussions
with departmental officials, ministers or the BRE about this issue
and about whether it will have a broader remit than looking at
"burdens on business", which you are obviously anxious
about?
Ms Veale: In fairness to the BRE,
the Chair comes in regularly to speak to the General Secretary
of the TUC and a team of us, and we have expressed those concerns
and he has gone to great lengths to reassure us. The trouble is
that the proof of the pudding will be in the eating and at the
moment, because of what they have done, for example, on the discrimination
law issue, our concern is that they are talking the talk but they
are not walking the walk. In practice, they are defaulting into
taking an awful lot more notice of one very vociferous pressure
group than they are of all sorts of other interests out there.
They are not looking at other factors that come into developing
a piece of legislation which are all about better regulation.
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