Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)

My Lords, it is late, so I shall be relatively brief and not revisit the issues that we looked at in Committee. When I tabled these amendments, I still hoped that there would be some agreement reached on restoring the information hooks that Parliament has relied on until now for oversight, and to suggest a minimum set of reporting requirements in the current void of the strategy report. But it has been made clear by the Minister now, and in discussions between the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, as chair of the Select Committee, that the Government will not accept any statutory requirements. If that is the case, the committee will have to draw that information in itself, and the letters from the regulators offer the promise that they will co-operate in that. I suggest that we should take that opportunity to be able to do more things in real time, rather than long after decisions are made. Obviously, it is for the committee to decide what written and oral information it wants and when, but one way to address the gap would be a triennial cycle of structured meetings with regulators. Each session could explicitly track developments in consultations and rule-making, including the work of the statutory panels, with an additional cycle of other matters. A suitable timing could be late February, when you could do an operational alignment review of draft business plans, budgets and cost-benefit analysis variances before they are locked in for the financial year. In mid-June, a session could be focused on the secondary competitiveness and growth objective, tracking live authorisation times, licensing, service-level agreements and regulatory overlap arising from current consultations and rule-making activity. In October, one could do a post-Recess review of rule-making, “Dear CEO” letters and summer-period backlogs ahead of the autumn Budget. Those are just examples of how you can get matters to fit in with the other fiscal events. Adopting that kind of timetable would give Parliament timely visibility. We could avoid boilerplate reporting and ensure accountability, even though we lose the statutory hooks. But I think that neither the regulators nor the Government really appreciated the message that crossing out all these previous statutory things indicated, and it seemed as if Parliament had been totally ignored as a stakeholder and as a party that should have been consulted. I hope that we can recover and come through this, probably with more reporting in the end that is pulled in at our request. I do not see that this as something that we have to negotiate; this is something where Parliament can ask, and we expect that the regulators will comply. Now that sounds aggressive, but I actually think that it will be able to be negotiated relatively reasonably, at least if it is anything like the experience that I have had elsewhere.