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”.
