Professional Qualifications Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-06-22
Topic: Government Operations
Sheila Masters (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, in moving Amendment 45 I will speak also to Amendment 46 in my name. I shall also speak to Amendments 63 and 68 in this group, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, to which I have added my name. Amendments 45 and 46 both deal with the position of regulators that oversee the regulation of a regulated profession but do not carry out that regulation themselves. This typically arises where a regulator oversees a number of professional bodies, each of which provides qualifications for, and regulate those who practise, the profession. An example of this is the Financial Reporting Council, which oversees regulated auditors, but wholly or partly through the work done by several professional accountancy bodies. Those professional bodies qualify and regulate the accountants within their membership, not all of whom are regulated auditors. I will not attempt a technical description of the medical and dental professions, but the General Medical Council and the General Dental Council sit over the top of various other bodies and medical colleges to which individuals belong, and I suspect that similar issues arise Clause 8 requires the regulator to publish information on requirements to practise. My Amendment 45 is intended to ensure that, if the information is displayed on another website, the regulator need not gather and load up that information on its own website but can signpost where to find it. For example, the FRC could signpost information on the websites of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the corresponding bodies in Ireland and Scotland, as well as the other bodies which have recognised audit qualifications. Anything else is just bureaucracy for the sake of it and is inefficient Clause 9 places a duty on a regulator to provide information to a regulator in another part of the UK. My Amendment 46 says that if someone else holds the information, they should seek to get the information provided by that other person. A regulator may have information about individuals in relation to the particular regulated profession but may not have information relating to the broader context of an individual’s membership of a professional body—for example, a full disciplinary or complaint record. Gathering information only for the purpose of sharing it with another UK regulator would again be duplicative and inefficient Since the amendments in this group were tabled, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and I have received an extraordinary letter from the Minister that is relevant to all the amendments in this group. This was one of my noble friend’s Sunday missives, which we have all learned to love during the passage of this Bill. Noble Lords may recall that I initially asked for a list of the bodies covered by the Bill. I received a letter, dated 23 March, listing 160 regulated professions. The Minister said at the time that this was a list of the regulated professions that BEIS considered fell within the Bill’s definition. Last Sunday’s letter claimed that the earlier list was "indicative"—although he did not say that at the time—and a new list was attached. The new list has over 250 professions and nearly 60 regulators.