Regulation
Ministers have in recent years found that regulation is generally more politically attractive than the alternatives (such as tax and spend). This has led to consistent complaints about the burden of regulation (see a separate note) and concern about the growth of the Regulatory State. The latter is often cited as one of three major changes in the UK constitution in the late 20th Century - the others being our membership of an expanding EU, and devolution. Some politicians express concern that there is no effective oversight of this new and powerful "State within a State", and draw attention to the damage that cumulative regulation might do to traditional freedoms and to econonomic growth. Those expressing such concerns are in effect pushing back against Ministers' determination to delegate politically difficult decisions to regulators: decisions ranging from control of interest rates to the choice of medicines available through the National Health Service.
It is hard to underestimate the constitutional significance of such delegations, especially in the field of economic regulation . All the utility regulators have wide powers, such as the power to establish price controls etc. for the companies which they regulate. Some, such as the energy regulator Ofgem, can go further and make laws, in the form of Statutory Instruments, albeit subject to the approval of Parliament. The Competition Commission has even wider powers. It can make a wide range of orders to overcome competition problems. Such orders, which might for instance establish a price control, can be binding on companies and individuals - including you! - and require no parliamentary approval whatsoever.
A House of Lords committee reported on this subject in in 2004:- (The Regulatory State: Ensuring its Accountability) although this report concentrated mainly (but not exclusively) on the accountability or otherwise of the economic regulators.
Click here to read a note detailing the way that Governments have responded to concerns about the regulatory burden, concentrating on the period from 2005.
More generally, however, regulators are perhaps over-accountable - in particular to the courts and via the media. There are growing concerns that the tension between accountability and transparency, on the one hand, and regulators' wish to avoid blame, on the other hand, is leading to over-weak and over-bureaucratic regulation. Follow this link for a more detailed discussion of this subject.
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