Nick Butler is right to call out toothless, indeed complicit, regulation (Crisis, crisis, everywhere … why regulatory failure is at the heart of Britain’s many problems, 4 July), but it is hardly a “neglect of the past decade”. Indeed, as a former adviser to Gordon Brown, he knows better – it was his boss who, as chancellor of the exchequer, appointed Philip Hampton in 2004 to oversee a review of 63 major regulatory bodies as well as 468 local authorities, resulting in a 2005 report, Reducing administrative burdens: effective inspection and enforcement, which proved to be a disastrous turning point in the trajectory of business regulation and enforcement.
It marked the consolidation of what had already been termed “Better Regulation”, a formal policy shift away from law enforcement to advice and education, a concentration of enforcement resources away from the majority of businesses on to so-called “high-risk” areas, and consistent demands that regulators do more with less. On the publication of the report, Brown summed up the new approach to regulation and enforcement pithily – it was characterised by “not just a light touch but a limited touch”.
Nick Butler might do well to recall this key moment in the undermining of business regulation, casting consumers, communities, taxpayers and workers aside in New Labour’s business-friendly turn.
Steve Tombs
Emeritus professor, The Open University
• Nick Butler’s argument is right, but it also misses the key economic driver for good management of natural resources: valuation of the resources themselves. The water authorities own the valuable infrastructure and gain income from being a monopoly supplier of natural resource. But the resource itself – water – is what should be valued. Because the authorities undervalue the resource and are insufficiently penalised for wasting it either through leakage or pollution, there is no economic incentive to properly manage, harvest, or indeed increase the resource – and thus add value to what should be the key asset. Until this is addressed, we will not see effective management of water in the UK.
Seán Marriott
Aldborough, Norfolk
