Do They Actually Know How Much it Costs?

GUEST BLOGGER - Ray Stafford

I know that industry bodies like the CBI routinely gripe about the burden of regulation on business. It’s such a common complaint, that I suspect that most people just tune it out, as part of the background noise to be expected from that interest group.

Looking through today’s work, I was taken aback by three different tasks, all of which have regulatory implications and all of which consumed expensive and scarce resources.

First up – a meeting with our HR manager to discuss an employee who is approaching their 65^th birthday. We have never enforced the default retirement age, and have always allowed employees the same rights that they are now getting by legislation. However, we have had to overhaul our procedures to ensure that most elusive of targets - ”compliance”. Lets just make this clear – this has not benefitted the employee one jot. All it has done was cost an hour of time for two senior members of the management team.

Secondly – we have a successful branch which we want to expand. Fortunately, the building next door is vacant, so in two or three calls to the agent, we reached a deal on taking over the unit. This is clearly good news for everyone, particularly the local economy. This happened about a month ago. We want to join the two units together, by knocking a doorway through the wall between them. No problem with the landlord, but the local Building control need drawings in quadruplicate (seriously!), structural calculations, plus a fee for the privilege. It will take two blokes less than a day to make this doorway. So far the red tape has cost over £1000 and delayed the project by 4 weeks. Incidentally, although one of those sets of drawings will be sent to the fire brigade for comment, once the work is done we will still have to update our own fire risk assessment, because they don’t do those any more.

Just after I came off the phone from chasing that up, our Finance Director came into the office. She was querying some purchases of vehicles, computers and other assets acquired in the last quarter. The department of national statistics wants to know what we spent on these things in the period January – March 2011, AND IT WANTS TO KNOW BY 8^th APRIL! Since we won’t necessarily have the invoices for March purchases yet, we need to “estimate” it. So the figure will inevitably be wrong, but we are required by law to supply it.

All these things genuinely came up on one perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning, in a middle sized business. In between time, I managed to spend some time on running the actual business. It made a pleasant change.

I am sure that any individual piece of regulation can be defended in detail. The problem is that more are added each year than are taken away. It’s the cumulative burden that is so stifling – the ratchet that imposes “just a little” new burden every few months.

So here is my solution:

• No new regulation should be imposed on businesses without primary legislation. Too much of this nonsense is imposed by un-accountable civil servants.

• All regulations should have a sunset clause which causes them to lapse after 5 years. The House of Commons would have to actively vote to renew any specific regulations that it wanted to remain.

“Ah” I hear you say. “But that would be administratively burdensome, would waste the time of our legislators and stop them from doing their proper job!”

Maybe so. At least then they would know what it feels like!