The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill contains provisions to increase the scope of regulatory reform powers (following a review undertaken by the Better Regulation Task Force) in order to tackle red tape and unnecessary regulatory burdens, building on the powers of the Regulatory Reform Act 2001. The Committee examines the provisions of the Bill as brought to the Lords in May 2006 (HLB 109, session 2005-06; ISBN 0108422399) which it finds to have been changed significantly since the Bill was first introduced into the Commons in January 2006. Although the Committee finds that the Bill proposes the greatest delegation of power to Ministers that it has seen, it does not find the regulatory reform provisions inappropriate, although it questions whether the 2001 Act could not itself have been amended. The provisions relating to consolidation, simplification and implementation of Law Commission recommendations are found to be unsuitable for delivery by delegated legislation and it is suggested that primary legislation subject to special procedure would be a better option to legislate for such purposes.
The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee reports to the House of Lords on the delegations in public bills. To assist it in its work, the Government provide the Committee with a delegated powers memorandum which is intended to explain and justify each delegation in a bill. Recently the Committee has commented adversely on a number of memoranda and this inquiry aims to find a remedy to the inconsistency in standards
In the report the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee offers a number of recommendations and conclusions on the procedures governing the scrutiny of certain legislative powers delegated by Parliament to ministers. The main procedures are the negative procedure and the affirmative procedure, but a number of variations to these have been introduced and a complex patchwork of procedures has grown up. The Committee recommends an enhanced scrutiny role given the increasing practice of delegating significant legislative powers to ministers. The report also calls for the Government to advise on how the House of Lords will scrutinise draft orders under a number of Acts.
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