Read on Twitter
I think my family is a unique hub of expertise on red tape challenges. In govt I worked on the 2011 one where we put all domestic regs under review. And @NicholasTyrone spent two years running the Red Tape Initiative which did the same for EU directives.
Tldr: don’t expect much. https://twitter.com/TelePolitics/status/1350808441514766336
Tldr: don’t expect much. https://twitter.com/TelePolitics/status/1350808441514766336
Three things will happen: 1) you will ask businesses and their representative groups what regulations they want to get rid of. They will have empty hands and talk instead about enforcement practice.
2) you will get a wall of complaints from regulation enthusiasts who are panicked about the threat of removing eg climate protections or equality rights (even if you had no plan of doing so).
3) you will generate a vast quantity of paperwork for yourself.
I do, as it happens, think it's worth doing. There is something to the criticism that - because government gets obsessed with new initiatives - mess, mistakes and anachronisms get left on the statute book. You will find some regulations that don't quite stack up any more.
In the Red Tape Challenge, we found for eg regulations about a few pretty ordinary chemicals which you need a specialist licence to sell. Rules preventing promotions of sweets and alcohol in a bundled package, which the gift sector wanted to do.
The Red Tape Initiative recommended some small changes to state aid, in particular related to affordable housing (though it's worth noting they thought this was do-able even within the EU)
It's good to create a hygiene system in your regulatory frameworks and keep things up for review.
BUT the madness is to overpromise some regulatory "bonfire" which never happens. And then gets re-announced by your successors to fail again, and fail worse.
BUT the madness is to overpromise some regulatory "bonfire" which never happens. And then gets re-announced by your successors to fail again, and fail worse.
At one point Steve Hilton wanted Cameron to stand in a room with all regulations printed out in piles and promise to replace them with a "slim paperback". 
And in the end, this all comes down to politics. In 2011, tax was formally out of scope of the Red Tape Challenge - though it was tax complexity that upset the most businesses. And immigration rules were de facto out of scope because Theresa May just said: it's more important.
Now - it's Brexit-required red tape that's out of scope. Oh, and probably immigration and tax too. Because they're all "more important".
This ought to lead to insight: understanding about where 'red tape' comes from: the government's legitimate democratically mandated aims.
This ought to lead to insight: understanding about where 'red tape' comes from: the government's legitimate democratically mandated aims.
Sadly, it doesn't. It just leads to the deeper conviction that these complaints about "red tape" must be the fault of other people's priorities, and they deserve to be bonfired.
Little will come of it. But advocacy businesses on both sides of every argument will make a lot of £
Little will come of it. But advocacy businesses on both sides of every argument will make a lot of £
