Examination of Witnesses (Questions 115
- 119)
TUESDAY 7 JULY 2009
IAN LUCAS
MP, MR JITINDERKOHLI
AND MR
PHILIP RYCROFT
Q115 Chairman:
Can I welcome you, gentlemen, to the meeting: Ian Lucas, the new
Minister responsible, a particular welcome to you; Philip Rycroft
in one of your early outings in this field; and Mr Kohli, we are
sad to see you moving on but best of luck in your new career and
thank you for the evidence that you have given on previous occasions.
I am not going to say that about this session until after it is
over! If I may go straight in because I know everyone is on very
tight diaries at the moment. In our evidence sessions various
people have mentioned the work of the Better Regulation Sub-Committee
of the National Economic Council and words like "waste of
time if it had no powers" and it will be "candy floss",
and so on, have cropped up. What powers of challenge will the
new NEC Sub-Committee and the Regulatory Policy Committee have,
who will be on it, and how will its members be empowered to challenge
government thinking? Will it publish its opinions and if not how
will the Government be held to account?
Ian Lucas:
The new Regulatory Policy Committee will be transparent in the
advice that it gives and one of the roles that is very important
is the advice that it provides to the National Economic Council
Sub-Committee relating to regulation will actually be publicly
available. By that we mean that the pressures that it is exerting
upon the committee will be there for all to see. I think that
is extremely important because in a similar way to the way that
the information of the National Audit Office is publicly available
and exerts political pressure on the politicians who ultimately
make the decisions, this advice will be there in the open. I think
that in itself will be a major pressure on the system to ensure
that the agenda that it is pursuing is taken forward. We see it
as a relatively small committee because I think it is important
that its advice is tightly brought together and presented to the
Sub-Committee of the National Economic Council, but we do believe
that it should represent the broad range of business experience.
It will certainly be tuned into consumer interests because this
is a very important agenda for consumers too, and although it
will be a small committee it will be informed by the whole regulatory
reform agenda, informed by the work of the Better Regulation Executive
and it will be—and I stress this again—conducting
its work in the open.
Q116 Chairman:
Will any of its work not be transparent?
Ian Lucas: Certain discussions
will clearly not be transparent in that not everything that is
said within government is transparent, but the key issues and
the advice that it gives will be there for all to see.
Q117 Chairman:
So it will hold the Government to account by virtue of its transparent
process?
Ian Lucas: Absolutely. What it
says will be there and if the Government chooses not to follow
its advice then clearly the politicians will have to justify those
decisions.
Q118 Chairman:
It is a small committee you have said but it is an important committee.
When will it meet? What sort of budget will it have? And a question
that stems from slightly derogatory comments about yourself, has
the importance of the regulatory reform agenda been downgraded
by the Department?
Ian Lucas: If I can deal with
that question first. I have been in post for three to four weeks
now and the regulatory reform aspect of my job has been a very,
very important role within the work that I have been doing. I
think I met Jitinder if it was not on day one it was certainly
day two—
Mr Kohli: It was day one.
Ian Lucas: And he has conveyed
to me the importance of better regulation and the work of the
Executive in the strongest terms. I have been enthused by his
enthusiasm, which you will know very well, and I have also discussed
the issue very closely with Philip on my left who will be taking
matters forward. This is an agenda that I personally see as extremely
important. I have run a small business in the past and I have
been frustrated by bad regulation in the time that I was running
that small business and I know the importance and frustrations
that business has with bad regulation. I have already met with
a number of members of representative organisations such as the
CBI and the Institute of Directors and heard directly from them
about their frustrations, so I am well aware of the high priority
that business and industry give to this agenda and I am determined
to take it forward. The Government sees it as a very, very important
agenda and it certainly has not been downgraded and I am not at
all offended by your suggestion that—
Q119 Chairman:
It was not my suggestion; I just read the press!
Mr Kohli: If we look at this from
a long-term perspective of where we were three or four years ago,
we did not have targets on administrative burdens, and people
were talking about that. We had very little progress in Europe.
We did not have impact assessments that gave transparently costs
and benefits. Over the last few years all of that has changed.
We have an admin burden target which has delivered real savings
for business which the business community genuinely welcomes.
There is obviously more to do in the future and we need to make
sure that the target is delivered in its entirety rather than
in part, which is where we are to date. At the European level
we have 27 Member States signed up to a similar target at the
European level. To say that was almost unimaginable a few years
ago is not an exaggeration. Looking forward we are talking about
an external committee to hold the Government to account, indeed
reacting to some of the comments that this Committee has made
to us. There has been a transformation in Parliament too. A few
years ago was government getting the kind of scrutiny that we
are now getting on regulatory reform? I do not think we were.
I think there has been a real transformation and I very much hope
that can continue in the future.
| 
