Why attempts to cut red tape almost always fail

Rishi Sunak has been appointed to chair a new committee that will be tasked with cutting red tape, particularly anything that originated from a European Union directive. Part of me thinks Boris has tasked Sunak with this as a means of taking some shine off of his Chancellor’s star — this latest venture to cut down on red tape is bound to fail as badly as the many other attempts that have been made over the years to drastically change the regulatory environment in this country. A lot of the thinking around regulatory reform in the UK is deeply wrongheaded, not from a left-wing or Remainer standpoint but from the perspective of anyone who really wants to make doing business in the UK easier and better.

I speak from some position of knowledge, having myself been the director general of an organisation that explicitly searched for examples of EU red tape, something called the Red Tape Initiative.