Regulation

Deregulation in the UK

This note summarises:

• the history of deregulation in the UK through to 2007, and in particular ...
• the Better Regulation Action Plan - i.e. the activity that began when the Government began to be seriously concerned, in 2004/2005, about the burden of regulation, including ...
• the Hampton report.

Developments since early 2007 are summarised in a separate note.

Brief History

Concerns about the burden of regulation are hardly new. Ministers generally ignore them for some years, and then respond by announcing a flurry of initiatives, which seldom achieve much more than a temporary reduction in the flow of regulation, given the separate pressure that Ministers are always under to "do something".

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the UK economy is probably less regulated than many others, the issue again received a good deal of attention from early 2005, partly driven, no doubt, by the Government's need to be seen to be business-friendly around the time of the May 2005 general election. There were several strands to the activity, including a yet further strengthening and renaming of the unit - this time to become the Better Regulation Executive - "the BRE". Each of the main strands of the activity is summarised below.

1. Improving [Regulatory] Impact Assessments

Building on their March 2004 Report, the National Audit Office reported in March 2005 that there was "scope for significant improvement" in the quality of Government Departments' Regulatory Impact Assessments. There were said to be two principal problems. First, RIAs were often drafted too late, and after the policy had in practice become irreversible. Second, they had become complex, including all sorts of impacts such as on the legal aid bill! It was therefore difficult to see the wood for the trees and, because some of the many impacts were inevitably hard to assess, it had become acceptable to be quite vague about all the impacts, including very important ones.

In response, the Better Regulation Executive are currently consulting on various improvements, including requiring the (renamed) Impact Assessments to be shorter and more transparent, and to increase the accountability of those signing them off. But it seems unlikely, even so, that the new assessments will overcome the two fundamental problems with such documents:

• Impact assessments must be drafted so as to be acceptable to Ministers who are often determined - for what seem to them good and strong reasons - to introduce the new burden, whatever it costs. (It is doubtful, for instance, whether Ministers will resile from their current (and understandable) determination to force all employers to require their employees to save for their retirement, despite the huge administrative burden this will place on smaller firms.)
• The costs and benefits are hard (or impossible) to quantify. (Departments' estimates of costs are bound to be optimistic, and by definition do not include unintended consequences, whilst it is very difficult to put a cost on a wide range of benefits, such as those associated with greater employment rights.)

2. Measuring Administrative Burdens & Simplification Plans

These proposals, together with the later proposal of regulatory budgets are summarised in a separate note.

The third development in March 2005 was the publication, by the Treasury, of the Hampton Report: "Reducing Administrative Burdens: Effective Inspection and Enforcement". The report was principally aimed at increasing the efficiency of, and reducing the burden on "honest businesses" of, inspection and enforcement. In other words, it targetted the third of the problem areas listed towards the beginning of the separate note on burden of regulation. But a good deal of Treasury-inspired politics lay behind the creation of the Hampton Review, and the report was of course written by Treasury officials. Philip Hampton is an excellent and sensible man, but was too busy with his 'day job' (Chairing J Sainsbury plc) to take a detailed interest in the report written in his name. The report was certainly not aimed at reducing the overall burden of regulation - which would have brought it up against a number of Treasury-created burdens, including tax credits - and in particular was not allowed to look at the inspection and enforcement activities of HM Revenue and Customs - surely the department with which almost every business comes into most frequent contact. In practice, therefore, the review team concentrated on inspection and enforcement in the areas of environmental protection and health and safety, and sensibly looked at the interaction of national and local government in these areas.

The report recommended that:

• comprehensive risk assessment should be the foundation of all regulators' enforcement programmes;
• there should be no inspections without a reason, and data requirements for less risky businesses should be lower than for riskier businesses;
• resources released from unnecessary inspections should be redirected towards advice to improve compliance;
• there should be fewer, simpler forms;
• data requirements, including the design of forms, should be coordinated across regulators;
• when new regulations are being devised, Departments should plan to ensure enforcement can be as efficient as possible, and follows the principles of this report; and
• thirty-one national regulators should be reduced to seven more thematic bodies.

The report also recommended that:

• a Better Regulation Executive should be created to take over the responsibilities of the Better Regulation Task Force and the Cabinet Office's Regulatory Impact Unit,
• penalty regimes should be reviewed - and generally made tougher (He noted that it often takes regulators ages to impose penalties which are then often less than what it would have cost the business to comply with the legislation if the first place.), and that
• the Government should adopt the following principles of inspection and enforcement:
  • regulators, and the regulatory system as a whole, should use comprehensive risk assessment to concentrate resources on the areas that need them most;
  • regulators should be accountable for the efficiency and effectiveness of their activities, while remaining independent in the decisions they take;
  • all regulations should be written so that they are easily understood, easily implemented, and easily enforced, and all interested parties should be consulted when they are being drafted;
  • no inspection should take place without a reason;
  • businesses should not have to give unnecessary information, nor give the same piece of information twice;
  • the few businesses that persistently break regulations should be identified quickly, and face proportionate and meaningful sanctions;
  • regulators should provide authoritative, accessible advice easily and cheaply;
  • when new policies are being developed, explicit consideration should be given to how they can be enforced using existing systems and data to minimise the administrative burden imposed;
  • regulators should be of the right size and scope, and no new regulator should be created where an existing one can do the work; and
  • regulators should recognise that a key element of their activity will be to allow, or even encourage, economic progress and only to intervene when there is a clear case for protection.

The Government accepted all the report's recommendations. (This was hardly surprising as government officials had written it!) Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown accordingly announced a Better Regulation Action Plan in May 2005. This involved "a new risk-based approach to regulation", a one-third cut in inspections, a reduction in the number of regulators from 29 to 7, a 25% reduction in form-filling and the creation of the Better Regulation Executive reporting to a Better Regulation Commission. Where legislation was to be necessary, this would take the form of legislation to be introduced in early 2007 as well as separate legislation (see further below) to make it easier to amend outdated legislation etc.

However, many of Hampton's recommendations were less straightforward than they first appear:

• It is easy to write regulations that are easily understood, easily implemented, and easily enforced - as long as you leave plenty of discretion to the regulator. Unfortunately most UK businesses and their representatives prefer certainty - and that means detailed regulations covering every conceivable circumstance. (See my separate note on the transposition of EC Directives.)
• It is not difficult or expensive to employ staff who either have in depth knowledge of complex regulations, or have basic knowledge of a wide range of regulations. But it is expensive to train and employ staff who are truly able to "provide authoritative, accessible advice". The private sector do employ such people. They are called solicitors and accountants - and they do not come cheap!
• If businesses do not have to "give the same information twice", then does this mean that regulators must be free to swap information amongst themselves? But this is generally frowned upon as breaching rights to privacy - and the right to tell one regulator one thing, and another another!
• It is not clear how regulators will identify businesses that break regulations, if "no inspection should take place without a reason" - unless random inspections are still to be allowed - which is hardly what the principle seems to imply.

Put another way, it was inevitable that the new "super-regulators" would indue course be accused of being one or all of over-large,over-bearing, out of touch, over-expensive and employing front-line staff who are unfamiliar with the full breadth of the organisation's regulatory remit. For further detail see a separate note on regulatory size and effectiveness.

An update document "Implementing Hampton: from enforcement to compliance" was published in November 2006.

4. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006

This legislation, enacted in November 2006, introduced new powers to reform outdated, unnecessary or over-complicated legislation, to be used in particular to implement government departments' simplification plans (see above) and uncontroversial Law Commission proposals. It also gave Ministers the power to implement the structural reform of regulatory bodies, as recommended by Hampton (other than the major changes being implemented in the separate Bill - see above), and the power to encourage a risk-based and proportionate approach to regulation and inspection. This is to be achieved by requiring certain regulators to follow a Code of Practice (see item 8 below) which will require regulatory activities to be carried out in a way which is "transparent, accountable, proportionate, consistent and targeted only at cases in which action is needed"..

Much of the Act was uncontroversial, although the regulators themsleves are concerned that it will offer rogues yet another opportunity to challenge actions which might thwart their roguery. But the first part of the Act gave Ministers sweeping new powers, excersiable via secondary legislation. They can now create new criminal offences for which people can be imprisoned for up to two years, and they can remove "administratve inconveniences" - a pretty wide definition in the wrong hands.

Ministers argued that the Act merely removed technical obstacles to the operation of the Regulatory Reform Act 2001 (which itself went further than the previous Deregulation and Contracting Out Act 1994). All three pieces of legislation were, or are, intended to allow the Government to use secondary legislation ("orders") to amend primary legislation. However, as the Government's consultation document said :- "The powers in the [2001] RRA, building on those in the DCOA, are constitutionally ground-breaking. They allow wide ranging reforms across a number of Acts without the mechanisms for formal debate on the floor of the House, which would normally be afforded to any amendment to primary legislation. They were designed to deliver better regulation measures that were technical and consensus-driven. Effective consultation and detailed scrutiny in Parliamentary Committees guarantee appropriate use of the powers."

Because of its constitutional sensitivity, the early drafts of the 2006 legislation were said by the Government to make sensible improvements to the old legislation, without going way beyond its purpose. But not all consultees agreed that it met this test, and many MPs shared their concerns. (One academic called it the "abolition of Parliament Bill"! Others claimed that it could be used to introduce house arrest, re-write the rules on immigration and make other dramatic changes. Marcel Berlins, writing in the Guardian in February 2006, accepted that there were safeguards to prevent this sort of dictatorial behaviour, but pointed out, quite rightly, that such safeguards can "look better on the page than they perform in practice".)

It was therefore perhaps no surprise that the Government announced, in April 2006, that the Bill's proposed powers were to be curtailed. "At the moment ... the Bill deliberately seeks to take a wide power. We're going to focus that power more on regulatory outcomes, such things as productivity, competititiveness and reducing bureacracy, rather than replacing legislation". House of Commons and Lords committees were also given the power to block any proposals.

5. The Macrory Review

Hampton's proposed review of penalty regimes - which he hoped would give regulators the power to impose quicker, stronger penalties - was carried out by a team led by Professor Richard Macrory. Its report, published in November 2006, argued that the current system was too heavily reliant on criminal prosecution, and that a more flexible set of regulatory sanctions, including an element of redress for the harm caused by culprits, would resolve many cases more quickly and effectively. The Government accepted all the recommendations, though it was some time before - in February 2010 - the Environment Agency and Natural England became the first regulators to be given new civil powers include the power to impose fixed and variable monetary penalties and issue compliance notices. The accompanying press release noted that "the sanctions will provide an alternative to criminal prosecutions for regulators which is more proportionate and reflects the fact that the majority of non-compliance by businesses is unintentional." But there was no mention of 'redress for the harm caused by culprits'.

6. Transposition of European Legislation:- The Davidson Review

This review of whether the UK had over-implemented European legislation was carried out by a team led by Lord Davidson QC and was published in November 2006. The review concluded that some over-implementation had certainly occurred, but may not be as widespread in the UK as is sometimes claimed. Click here to read a detailed discussion of this interesting subject..

7. Better Local Regulatory Enforcement & the Rogers Review

This "new front in the Government's drive to [improve] regulation" was opened in November 2006. Noting that 80% of business inspections are carried out by local (not national) government, it was announced that Peter Rogers would lead a review which would "identify five national priorities for local authority enforcement so as to reduce regional variations and to reduce the burden caused by heavy handed enforcement on low-risk issues". This in due course led to the establishment of the LBRO and the Primary Authority principle - see the section, below, on the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act 2008.

8. The Regulators' Compliance Code

Another outcome from the Hampton Review, the Government intended that this code, replacing the old "Enforcement Concordat", would be enacted by Autumn 2007 (in the form of an order made under the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act) and come into force in April 2008.

9. The Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act 2008

Many of the above recommendations were implemented via this Act which:

• established the Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO) whose purpose is to promote more consistency across local authorities in the way they enforce regulations and work with central government,
• established a Primary Authority Principle, whose aim is to ensure coordinated regulatory action (such as trading standards activity) as it impacts on companies such as supermarkets which operate in a number of local authority areas (The Primary Authority scheme is run by the LBRO.),
• enabled the implementation of the recommendations of the Macrory Review - see above, and
• placed a duty on specified regulators to review the burdens they impose, reduce any that are unnecessary and unjustifiable, and report on their progress annually.

Subsequent deregulatory developments are summarised in a separate note.

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