Examination of Witnesses (Questions 255-259)
BARONESS VADERA,
SIR WILLIAM
SARGENT AND
MR JITINDER
KOHLI
24 JUNE 2008
Q255 Chairman: Can I welcome you here
for the session of evidence, Minister; it is a pleasure to have
you here; and Mr Kohli again, and of course for the first time
Sir William Sargent—congratulations on your knighthood.
Sir William Sargent:
Thank you.
Q256 Chairman: As you know, we are
coming towards the end of our evidence gathering session and it
is appropriate that we should use this opportunity to probe the
Minister directly on a number of issues that have cropped up during
our inquiry. Can I first of all simply ask you, Minister, does
the BRE have sufficient high-level backing and, if so, who provides
it? What incentives and levers does it have at its disposal to
encourage departments to regulate better?
Baroness Vadera: The BRE was in
this current form set up on the recommendation of the Hampton
Review, which was instigated by the then Chancellor and now the
Prime Minister, so I think it would be fair to say that it has
backing at the highest level. It obviously has the Prime Minister's
backing; it is very core to what we need to deliver for competitiveness
and productivity, so it has the Chancellor, it has the Secretary
of State for BERR and we have Cabinet discussions about regulation,
so it has very high-level backing. I think it is also important
to note that William, who is both the Chair of BRE but also a
business person in his own right, has authority and has institutionalised
authority as well as his own personal authority, which is around
the fact that he can write to the Prime Minister, have access
to the Prime Minister if he feels that there are problems and
he can attend certain Cabinet Committee meetings, etcetera. I
think that in the system as a whole, in my experience of the system
as a whole people react and respond to procedures and institutionalised
structures, so we have those as well around things like the impact
assessment or certain policies around SMEs coming in, having to
be thought about in a different way; or, as we hope we will go
on to discuss at some point, our regulatory budgets. There are
other processes in place like our clearance processes, so I think
that the system tends to respond to these institutionalised structures
which the BRE has the ability to influence, to use as a lever
to influence outcomes.
Q257 Chairman: Does the Panel for
Regulatory Accountability have a role in supporting BRE to push
through its initiatives at departmental level?
Baroness Vadera: My experience
of the PRA is that it has always been a very good sanction for
people. There are a number of things that actually do not get
through the system just because people know that it is hanging
over them, the possibility that they would have to go through
quite an accountability system; so it is not something that is
very easy to publish or to give you a list of, but certainly from
my experience of it I know that there are a lot of things that
have been withdrawn or restructured, or impact assessments have
been reconsidered because officials across Whitehall have known
that they are going to have to come to the PRA and account to
them if they did not do that.
Chairman: We will come back to that relationship
with the departments later.
Q258 Dr Naysmith: Good morning, Minister.
Does the government still believe that replacing the Better Regulation
Committee with the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council was the
right thing to do?
Baroness Vadera: Yes, I think
it does. The BRC has been great and we had taken forward basically
the reviews and the work that it had recommended. The most recent
thing that we have implemented from it is obviously around the
regulatory budget—that was first discussed in 2005. One
of the interesting things that came out of BRC was that there
was a general view that actually the underlying structural problem
was around the perception of risk in society as a whole and that
if you did not get that quite right and people always had a knee-jerk
reaction to risk then we would have problems around regulation,
and how was it that we were going to change that sense of culture
and acceptability. So actually it was the BRC's recommendation
that there was something done around risk and there was a risk
report that it did, which was in fact done by Rick Haythornthwaite
who then obviously became the head of the new Council that replaced
it.
Q259 Dr Naysmith: So who now provides
the high-level strategic thinking one stepped removed from actual
administration? Who provides the strategic feed-in to your programme?
Baroness Vadera: The people who
have always provided it, which is the government because whatever
you might say about it—and we very much valued the work
of the BRC—it was in the early days of quite an ambitious
programme and we worked very closely with the BRC, so it was not
as if it all came out of just the BRC. But if you were to ask
me who I actually thought drove the regulatory agenda in the last
six or seven years I would say it was the government that drove
it. Obviously in discussions with business, which we continue
to have in very different fora, individually in departments and
also collectively through the Business Council. Each department
has a panel, and as the Minister for Regulatory Reform I meet
with businesses to specifically talk about ideas around regulation,
so we have that interaction already.
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