The Red Tape Challenge has enabled individuals and organisations to direct government and civil service attention at where pointless bureaucracy hits hardest, and argue the case for repeal. It’s not clear yet what the outcome will be, but it is certainly a laudable exercise.
There are circumstances, however, where regulation is necessary. Far from being a burden on consumers, its absence disrupts major businesses and we all pay the price.
The most obvious recent example of this is the failure of plans to tighten the rules for those who buy and sell scrap metal, to try to get to grips with the pervasive problem of theft.
For utilities the problem is urgent: the number of metal thefts in the energy sector hit around 7,000 last year, up about 80 per cent on the year before, according to the Energy Networks Association. The same organisation, which has been working to solve the problem, quoted work by Deloitte saying that the bill was £60 million in 2010. The number of injuries, and even deaths, continues to tick upwards.
Yet when a private member’s bill was put forward to regulate scrap yards and the cash-in-hand part of the business, it was shot down. The industries involved thought they had cross-party support, but the government seems to have lost faith in it.
Maybe it’s too much to attribute that decision to the general aversion to regulation. But look at evidence from the water sector. Bad debt in the sector has always been a problem and the issue is getting worse, despite the best efforts of water companies to pursue debtors.
The fundamental problem is not so much that water companies lost the right to disconnect, although some complain about the loss of that tool. It is that very often water companies do not know who to bill, especially in the case where tenants are paying. The industry has lobbied for regulations that would require landlords to disclose tenants’ names, or be held liable for payment themselves.
That change was eventually made possible in last year’s Flood and Water Management Act. But now that the government is consulting on implementing that regulation, it has come up with another idea: a voluntary system where landlords step forward with information, along with data sharing with other organisations. This is surely more complex, more expensive, and less likely to solve the problem.
Of course, there is always more than one pressure as policy develops, and there may be more factors to blame than simply the desire for “less regulation” . But while we are looking afresh at the regulations we do have, and deciding which are worthwhile, we must not be misled into thinking that all regulation is bad.
Better regulation is not always the same as less regulation. On those two issues at least, it would benefit us all to have more regulation and to have it in place as soon as possible.
Janet Wood
This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 27 January 2012.
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