Should regulation be light touch or right touch?
I’ve spent most of my working life involved in regulatory debates.
This started when I worked at the Communications Workers Union which organises staff in the telecommunications and postal industries since both telecoms and posts are regulated. It has continued since I took early retirement from the CWU through my membership of the Communications Consumer Panel, Postwatch and Consumer Focus. Indeed, later this week, I’ll be lecturing on the future of regulation to an international audience at a course in London.
So I’m particularly interested in the efforts of the current Coalition Government to reduce regulation and I’ve been looking at the Cabinet Office web site called The Red Tape Challenge. Obviously regulation can be an excessive burden on industry and at its worst it increases costs and reduces innovation. But the banking crisis of the last few years shows the enormous price that we all pay if regulation is weak or inadequate.
The Government has a very simplistic attitude to regulation, encapsulated by its policy of ‘one in, one in’. It is not the absolute number of regulations that matter; it is the nature of those regulations and whether they are needed and efficacious.
July 8th, 2011 at 9:47 pm
My wife & I employ our teenage son as a trainee manager in a family busines with one cleaner, one office worker/receptionist/book-keeper and one gardener/handyman. Because there are six of us EVERY thing we do needs a written and filed risk assesment, – filed copied & updated. It takes many hours of midnight oil to write down and the common-sense gardener, who has survived 50 years withouit an accident adapts as he goes anyway.
July 10th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
without regulations being enforced more people will NOT return to their loved ones as their work place will have killed them. Roads with live speed cameras i.e. M42 have fewer incdents and better traffic flow proving that enforcement isn’t an impediement but a necessary tool
August 17th, 2011 at 2:35 pm
It’s interesting to see the government’s priorities, well stated in the phrase ‘…free up business and society from the burden
of excessive regulation.’ Business first, right? It’s an increasing murky business that strips pension funds, encourages cabals and cronyism, continues ‘black hole’ PFI accounting, fails to deal with tax havens and now wants to make it even easier to rip off the society that feeds it. Until ‘society’, in the sense that any decent person would view it, is placed first, we are doomed to follow every other greed-driven association of caesars and soldiers that ever ended in the sump of history.
September 2nd, 2011 at 11:03 pm
Unfortunately this Coalition Government has shown itself to be contradictory and slippery e.g. Cameron starting with “Hug a Hoodie – you don’t know where he’s come from” ending on “He’s from a broken and sick society and guilty of criminality”. The quest to get rid of red tape needs to be transparent and handled by the right people. Many laws and regulations come about due to a real need and take years to materialise and become part of society. Some will have served their purpose and some will need to be strengthened. We need measured and balanced change – no smoke screens for the strong and greedy to gain at the expense of the weak.
September 20th, 2011 at 10:47 am
This government has shown such a level of incompetence I would not trust them to remove any regulations.
November 29th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
I’ve worked in the leisure activity industry for 17 years the last 7 as H&S advisor, I spend 90% of my time tied to a desk producing risk assessments and method statements no one bothers to read apart from the ambulance chasers who then try to pick holes in the paperwork for claimants who see a no win no fee claim as a quick easy way of subsidising their weekend activities or their lack of income because they have been made redundant in the last 3 years? My time would be better spent out in the field ensuring safety standards are followed and maintained, not fending off silly and petty claims for bumps and bruises, lets get back to good old common sense. All adventure activities come attached with risks! Ban no fee ambulance chasers and lets deal with genuine claims as we did in times past, if it’s genuine put your money where your mouth is
May 31st, 2012 at 2:50 pm
You write “Together we can fight back – and free up business and society from the burden of excessive regulation.”
But who was it who produced the Red Tape and “excessive regulation” concerned?
Why, it was you- HM Government!