Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)

My Lords, the last two interventions seemed to raise two issues, not one. The first is the question of how many regulators and the second is their coverage. Who will they regulate? Will they regulate just, say, the public sector, or will they regulate, in effect, the whole of the economy, including retail, business, high street businesses and so on? You can argue a case for any of these approaches: you can try to do too much, and certainly you can fail and do too little. While I can see the case for a single regulator, my worry is that large organisations like that, with monopoly powers, in the end either tend to fail, because they just do not cope, or become overweening. I do not think that we want either of those two things. I am therefore in favour of something that is more decentralised than that and has more specialised regulators involved, partly because I think the nature of the regulation probably deserves that. However, at the same time, there has to be some degree of co-ordination—in fact, a high degree of co-ordination—between the regulators. They must operate according to the same principles, applied appropriately. They must espouse the same philosophy and must be seen to be fair. Therefore, great divergence and different approaches will equally not work. There needs to be a mechanism for co-ordination, for discussion and for agreement of principles. There also needs to be a thinker there somewhere. I am therefore in favour of some bit of the system being bigger than the rest, so that it inspires a degree of good and recognised co-ordination in the system.