Sir Nicholas Soames: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what the recommendations of the Reducing Regulation Committee are; and what steps the Government is taking to implement those recommendations.

Oliver Dowden, Parliamentary Secretary (Minister for Implementation): The Reducing Regulation Committee (RRC) is the primary forum in Government for securing collective agreement on issues related to reducing regulation. There are no definitive criteria for which issues engage collective responsibility but, as set out in the Cabinet Manual, issues which are likely to lead to significant public comment or affect more than one department will usually require collective agreement through Cabinet or a Cabinet Committee.

As the RRC is a Cabinet Committee, correspondence or discussions between its members are not publicly disclosed to protect the principles of collective responsibility. The Committee's function is to collectively agree the Government position on the matter that has been put to it, which will then be taken forward by the relevant department, almost always in a manner which will enter the public domain. As such, the Committee is just one element of the Government's wider efforts to reduce regulation led by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Hansard

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