The government launched a review of regulators on Tuesday to find ways of cutting red tape for businesses.
Businesses, consumers, and regulators have been called on to submit evidence on what has been working well and what changes are needed.
Kemi Badenoch, secretary of state for business and trade, said she wants to capitalise on the UK’s “Brexit freedoms” to “scrap unnecessary regulations that hold back firms and hamper growth.”
There are more than 90 regulatory bodies in the UK, according to the National Audit Office, with a combined total spend of more than £4 billion a year.
They oversee a wide range of industries and public services, including health care, aviation, financial products, and utilities such as water and electricity.
According to the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), 39 percent of small businesses have said red tape has held them back.
The DBT said businesses, consumer groups, and other industry leaders have complained that there are too many regulators that have “too many duties to trade-off against each other,” and they are too risk averse and focused on processes.
‘Blocker to Businesses’
During the 12-week call for evidence period, the department is seeking views on regulatory agility, proportionality, predictability, and consistency of approach.It will also consider whether anything else can be done to reform laws including retained EU law.
The review is being run in parallel with other more specific reviews of Ofgem, Ofwat, and Ofcom.
Ms. Badenoch said in a statement: “I want us to use our Brexit freedoms to scrap unnecessary regulations that hold back firms and hamper growth. It’s clear that the regulators that enforce the rules can also sometimes be a blocker to businesses, so our review will seek to root out the bad practices with the aim of making companies’ lives easier and reducing costs for consumers.”
Ms. Badenoch did not make direct reference to the announcement in her speech at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, but did claim she and her ministers are working to solve regulatory issues in the wake of Brexit.
“Whether it is the prime minister’s landmark Windsor Framework or the great work of my Lords ministers, Malcolm Offord and Timothy Minto, lowering export barriers and removing unnecessary regulations, I want you to know we are solving those problems one by one,” the minister said.
The government in May ditched its “bonfire of EU laws” that would see all remaining EU laws scrapped by the end of this year, and listed some 600 laws that will be dropped by the self-imposed deadline.
Conservative peer Lord Moylan previously told NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” that he believes handing rule-making powers to “independent and unaccountable” regulators is a “hopeless set-up for in a democratic society” and “totally offensive to democratic principles.”
Taking aim at the Online Safety Bill, he said elected and unelected representatives have no idea how the bill will operate in detail because it’s up to Ofcom.
He argued that regulators are “not accountable to the public in the same democratic way that lawmakers are accountable to the public in the Commons,” and suggested the UK needs to “get back to the notion of the non-regulated state, the state that lives on the law” and has “less of an ambition that the state should be able to control in detail.”
