Only two government departments saw net reduction in regulation: report

Only two Whitehall departments – one of which was the Department for Communities and Local Government – oversaw a reduction in regulation in the last six months of 2010, a report by The Times has claimed.

According to the newspaper, official parliamentary figures suggest that more than 200 regulations came into force over the period compared to 106 that were revoked.

Apart from the DCLG, the only government department to see a net reduction was the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. According to The Times, the Ministry of Justice came bottom after introducing 22 regulations and removing one.

The newspaper claimed that civil servants were “circumventing” the government’s so-called “one-in, one-out” system. Introduced on 1 September 2010, this requires ministers seeking to introduce new regulations imposing costs on businesses or the third sector to identify existing regulations with an equivalent value that can be scrapped.

The Times said officials underestimate the burdens of any new regulations and overplay the burdens of those pieces of regulation they plan to axe. It also accused senior officials from different departments of “colluding” to find old legislation that can be removed.

“There is something of a Whitehall game going on where department officials are phoning each other up, asking their colleagues to find something they can take off the books in order to get their new regulations through,” a source told the paper.

The Times also revealed that new regulations from the EU are not being included in the one-in, one-out system.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills, which introduced the system, acknowledged to the paper that it was “not perfect” but it was too early to say it was not working.

Sir Michael Gibbons, chairman of the Regulatory Policy Committee, claimed in an interview with The Times that a culture change was needed among Whitehall officials.

“There is always an inevitable human tendency to minimise the ‘ins’ and maximise the ‘outs’,” he added. “That is in the departmental interests. It is our role to make sure that is resisted.”