Episode 40: Baroness Dianne Hayter - Inside the House of Lords Report on Regulation and Economic Growth

So I say that you chair the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee, and the role of that committee is in part to scrutinize the work of UK regulators.

So can you tell us a little bit more about your committee and its work on regulation in general before we come onto the specific report that you've published?

Thank you.

Uh, well, the committee was set up in April, uh, gosh, f-four year, five years ago now, twenty twenty-one, um, following a review of how the Lords did their scrutiny work as we came out of the European Union, because quite a lot of what we now regulate in the UK was done by various European bodies, and therefore we had an elected European Parliament at that stage that used to look quite closely at quite a lot of the regulation that was taking part.

Therefore, once we'd left the EU, uh, people realized that someone had to step in, if you like, for that oversight and that a greater scrutiny was needed-

Mm

... over the regulations that were being, if you like, renational, you know, brought back in-house i-into the UK.

And that was when the idea of this was being set up.

Um, and the, um, w-the work of the committee was also to be able to, I think, look cross, uh, department.

You know, very often you have individual, uh, regulators report to a particular individual department, but actually there's no oversight about looking at regulation either when more than one regulator can impact on a business or indeed, um, w-w-whether some of them actually might conflict or, or, or any of that.

So the idea of having a cross-department, uh, way of that, looking at that was also really important.

Yeah, I think that, I think is very important and, um, and I'm very glad that your committee exists.

And, um, uh, tell us a little bit about how that's, uh, grown over time because regulation's gone up the political agenda, um, both for the last, uh, administration and this one, and w-the work of a committee such as yours looking across, uh, sectors, looking across departments, I think is particularly necessary.

So, so has the work of your committee changed over time, do you know?

Um, it, it hasn't done a lot, um, that really reflects the, that cross department.

I mean, we did a very important report on the building safety regulator, which in, in a sense is at variance with what I'm saying about looking cross department.

It was a particular regulator where w- you know, we, the committee before I joined it realized that it was actually not doing what, you know, what it says on the tin.

Um, and so the current, um, report looking across the whole scene at regulators across department is the first time perhaps that we've as strongly as that, uh, looked across the piece.

Mm.

And what it has thrown up is the, uh, is the lack of a central government review, if you like, of all regulators.

It's quite interesting that the, the, the particular issue we're looking at of the growth agenda At one sense, the regulations come under the Department of Business and Trade, but actually, it's the Treasury that is driving this agenda.

Um, and the two of them have had to get together and have meetings in order to look at how regulators can work out what the Treasury to help the Treasury with its policy.

And I think, although we haven't particularly said that in our report, that shows a gap in governance about looking across all of regulators rather than doing it by department by department.

But I think this is probably the first report that has flagged up that, um, issue of, of, of cross departments.

Yes.