The foot dragging has been even worse when it comes to deregulation. The pandemic does admittedly offer some excuse, but it still almost beggar’s belief that more than five years after the referendum to leave the European Union the Government has yet to put anything on the table that can unambiguously be seen as a Brexit dividend.
OK, so there was some success with the vaccine rollout, but even this is arguable and, in any case, it hasn’t saved the UK from a much greater hit to the economy and the public finances from the pandemic than virtually anywhere else in Europe.
I’m really hoping that the deregulatory proposals amount to more than just the establishment of a new “Office for Deregulation”, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one, because there genuinely are lots of ways in which Brexit freedoms can be used for the benefit of enterprise and the economy. But beyond pursuit of some obvious opportunities for smarter regulation – on Solvency II and crop gene editing, for instance – no one should hold their breath.
It is not as if it hasn’t been tried before. This is what a one time colleague of mine wrote about Michael Heseltine’s promised “bonfire of red tape” nearly 30 years ago: “The Government yesterday set about repairing its battered popular image by embarking on what it styled as the biggest purge of bureaucracy and red tape since the Second World War.
Centrepiece of the campaign to loosen the burden of legislation on business, widen consumer choice and save industry billions of pounds in compliance costs is the Deregulation and Contracting Out Bill.” Well that did a lot of good, didn’t it?
Similarly David Cameron back in 2011. “There are over 21,000 statutory rules and regulations in force, and I want us to bring that number – and the burden it represents – down. Indeed, I want us to be the first government in modern history to leave office having reduced the overall burden of regulation, rather than increasing it.” Needless to say, he failed.
The fact is that neither voters nor firms would mind so much about a rising tax burden if they thought they were getting value for money. Instead they see their hard earned pounds gobbled up by a bottomless pit of bureaucracy, petty rule making, gold-plated public sector pensions and the perma-crisis on steroids otherwise known as the NHS. Europe isn’t even the half of it. The vast bulk of the problem is home grown.
As regular readers will know, I’m no fan of Brexit, but it does at least have merit in this regard – that having left the European Union, which doesn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm either, there is no one any longer to blame for Britain’s failings other than ourselves. Would that we had a Government willing to face up to the reforms needed to correct them.
