Given that the government’s lust for setting targets has done so much to increase bureaucracy in public services
Given that the government’s lust for setting targets has done so much to increase bureaucracy in public services, one could be forgiven for a little scepticism regarding the Prime Minister’s latest target: to reduce red tape by 25 per cent. Presumably a new quango will be set up to measure the exact length of red tape which binds the country, so that Blair will be able to pronounce victory once precisely a quarter of it has been chopped off.
I don’t hold out a great deal of hope that this latest initiative will achieve anything. We’ve heard it all before. It was six years — or about 20,000 new regulations — ago that Blair first set up the Better Regulation Task Force, citing the example of 120 Acts of Parliament which are concerned with fire safety. Chaired by Lord Haskins, the task force was supposed to issue ‘Regulatory Reform Orders’ ordering civil servants to ease the burdens of business. What became of it? Two years ago ministers gingerly admitted that it had managed to do away with just 27 regulations. The trouble was, it added, that Regulatory Reform Orders had, er, themselves become too bureaucratic.
Worse, the task force seemed rather more preoccupied with tackling regulations which made life difficult for the government rather than those which affect citizens. Last year it published a report, Less is More, proposing a handful of laws for abolition. One of them was the Trades Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, which obliges unions to hold a ballot every ten years to check whether their members still want some of their subscriptions used to make political donations.
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