Douglas Carswell's Blog

Red tape talk

There’s been little economic growth for two years. It is becoming increasingly obvious that monetary stimulus has failed to produce prosperity. And the party conference season is about to begin.

I reckon this means that sooner or later we’ll hear a minister will give a speech about deregulation. Like Hezza, Blair and all the others before them, someone will soon tell us about how they intend to “slash red tape”.

But will it ever happen?

In this morning’s constituency post bag alone, I had two cases complaining about new regulations. 

In the first case, a local entrepreneur is worried about new rules that will harm his wedding car hire businesses.  Apparently the Law Commission (I don’t remember them standing at the last election?) want private hire rules extended to include his business. To what urgent problem this is the answer they will not say.  

In the second case, a local food retailer is anxious about a new national food standards regime that the Food Standards Agency wants to impose across every local authority area. How we managed to cope for so long without this blanket scheme, we can only guess.     

Deregulation? Judging from the content of one morning’s post bag, the government has not even begun to slow down the rate at which red tape is generated.

Cocooned in Whitehall, how many ministers yet grasp that it is the army of officialdom over which they nominally preside that produces much of the problem in the first place?

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