As the sewage-filled waters start to close over the heads of Torydom, their Tufton Street thinktankers carry on like the orchestra on the Titanic. In three grand Westminster houses dwell the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the anti-migration Migration Watch UK, the climate crisis-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, the anti-EU European Foundation, the Margaret Thatcher-founded Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and others, all very opaque about their sources of funding. Now they sink together, still playing the old songs painfully out of tune with the country of which they seem to know nothing.
I went to watch them on Wednesday in one of their lavish salons, as the CPS launched a report calling yet again for more state-shrinking deregulation. I waited until the very end, but no, there was not one line, not one mention in their report of the great regulatory failures of our time. Not a word about Ofwat letting water companies pour sewage into rivers and seas. Nothing about all the other failed regulators – rail, mail, buses, energy, environment, broadcasting and the rest.
Instead, there was a familiar salvo against over-regulation. It is full of regret and recrimination that 14 years of Tory rule promising unregulated bliss has delivered not fewer regulations but more. (To govern is to regulate, as even this government has discovered.) Ruefully, the CPS recalled David Cameron’s promise of one-in-and-three-out bonfires of red tape and quangos. It quotes Ready for Rish!’s leadership campaign video, touring the “Brexit delivery department”, and showing piles of EU rules fed into a shredder to an Ode to Joy soundtrack.
What disappointment, its report says, that the government has “sunset only 587 EU-derived legislative instruments, rather than the many thousands that some Brexiteers had hoped for”. Brexit was meant to unchain Britain from “a hidebound, sclerotic, safety-first regulatory regime”. Instead, regulation has increased substantially, costing, it claims, £6bn more every year since 2010. It wants impact assessments on all regulations – and conducted by who? A new regulator of regulators.
That’s the only reference to Brexit in a week when import checks are silting up cross-Channel trade at huge new costs to business. Nor was there any reference to the phenomenal cost of the government’s UKCA safety Kitemark to replace the identical EU CE mark, only scrapped after some businesses had already paid for double certification. The monumental regulatory costs of leaving the EU is absent from this report.
Is business baying for a new wave of ideological deregulation? Not at all, says the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC); it wants regulatory stability. “Businesses are not clamouring for a bonfire of regulations for the sake of it. They don’t want to see divergence from EU regulations that makes it more difficult, costly or impossible to export their goods and services,” says William Bain, their head of trade policy.
Here’s the significance, showing how much the ground has crumpled under Tufton Street’s foundations. You may not remember that the BCC used to be at the forefront of early Brexitry. They were a foghorn for deregulation of the most extreme kind, bellowing against Brussels directives and blasting the Labour government. They kept an annual Burdens Barometer, ammunition much quoted by anti-EU press and MPs. The colossal list of regulations they claimed obstructed business included basics: holiday pay, sick pay, maternity pay, the minimum wage and even “control of asbestos at work regulations”. Everything was in their barometer, all health and safety, food and medicine rules, costed at impossible billions.
But the BCC’s barometer vanished a few years ago, and you won’t find a single footprint left on their website. I remember it because I wrote about it. The huge cost of regulation claimed in this new report and the 90 regulatory organisations the CPS claims to have found (no list included), are as dubious as the old burdens barometer, listing mainstays of civilisation.
If you asked most people “what’s wrong with regulation in Britain?”, my guess is many would talk of regulators’ failure to stop rivers and seas full of sewage, failure to ensure an adequate National Grid, or fast broadband and phones that work everywhere. They might point to the wild west of the internet and failure to protect children and the rest of us from scammers and election fakes. Or HMRC’s lack of resources, meaning UK employers can expect a minimum wage inspection every 500 years, or to collect taxes from mega-tech avoiders or offshore cheaters. If people knew how cuts have demolished local environmental health and trading standards, they would be shocked to find the regulation of restaurants, food and product safety barely enforced.
More, not less, regulation is what people tend to demand. The CPS panel bemoaned how every catastrophe – the banking crash or Grenfell Tower – leads to public demand for more safeguarding. The report says new post-Grenfell building rules requiring two staircases on tall blocks is excessive. I don’t know if that’s so, but I can guess what most voters might think. Bankers, who escaped any retribution while everyone else paid for their crash, kick hard against what they call an excessive regulatory response: they may win, as they threaten to leave London.
I am sure there is outdated or wrongheaded regulation: almost everything needs constant reform, revision and examination of latest evidence. But what’s bizarre about the CPS report is its total silence on the greatest regulatory failures of our time, possibly because so many spring from privatisations by their founder, Thatcher, when she created mighty commercial monopolies with only puny regulators. Of this, the public is well aware: two thirds of Tory voters support the renationalisation of water and energy to give stricter regulation to protect us all. The old ship Tufton Street is lost at sea. Watching their gathering, I observed it going down with all hands on deck, singing their favourite shanties but ignorant or indifferent to the land of 2024.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
