Time to stamp out red tape

The British Chambers of Commerce has calculated that the cost, since 1998, of the 69 regulations that have significant business burden (out of 1,400 regulatory impact assessments undertaken by the government) has risen from £10bn in 2001 to a staggering £50.3bn in 2005, a five-fold increase (see graph).

The government aims to keep the burden of regulation down by reducing and simplifying bureaucracy, yet the regulations to simplify the taxation of pensions, introduced in 2006, has cost businesses £178m! The Employment Act introduced in 2002 had, by 2006, cost business £864m.

The Better Regulation Task Force, now known as the Better Regulation Commission, has completely failed to make any impact. The Commission’s role is “to provide independent advice to government, from business and other external stakeholders, about new regulatory proposals and about the Government’s overall regulatory performance.” The great thing about having independent advice is that it can be (and often is) ignored.

The UK construction industry has an annual output of £108bn, which means if the cost of red tape is just 2% of output, then it is costing us a staggering £2bn! Many forms are lengthy, complicated and full of jargon. Nobody has thought about the balance between the costs and the value of providing the information.

The Americans are good at red tape too, but at least they have a way of letting you know how much bureaucracy is involved in the form being completed. Their green visa waiver form tells you how long it will take you to understand the form and how long it will take to complete. Perhaps all our forms should have a health warning. Better still, many of them could be eradicated altogether or at least the government could adopt a “one in - one out” policy.

We have no monopoly on red tape but we seem to excel at it. Perhaps we ought to make an Olympic event out of it for 2012, then we would be certain to win some gold medals.

Roger Flanagan, the president, and I would like to focus on the unnecessary burdens placed on the construction industry by the bureaucracy and red tape which seems to roll out daily. If you have any examples, send them to us at redtape@ciob.org.uk so we can identify the worst. Enough is enough.

Chris Blythe is chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Building