Cutting Red Tape remains a key objective for the Norfolk Chamber as we head towards 2013. The Minister for Business and Enterprise, Rt Hon Michael Fallon, announced recently that as part of the government’s red tape blitz a new One-in Two-out rule will be imposed across every Whitehall department from January 2013. This will mean that for every one pound of new UK regulations imposed, two pounds of savings will need to be found by departments to offset this. The new system will apply to domestic regulation affecting businesses and voluntary organisations. This is similar to the previous system of ‘One-in, One-out’ which required the costs of every new regulation to be matched by savings of an equivalent amount.
We welcome this measure which should help to reduce the unnecessary amount of red tape facing companies. Some regulation is undeniably needed with the ‘right kind’ leading to economic benefits – this is in contrast to needless bureaucracy at the moment which can prevent companies from growing, innovating and creating jobs. Businesses from across the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce network consistently tell us they are spending time dealing with unnecessary regulations that should be spent growing their companies.
This regulatory change, whilst welcome, will only apply to the regulations currently deemed ‘in scope’ of the current framework. This effectively means that a large chunk of regulations affecting business, including EU regulations, are excluded from the process. For this system to work and be successful the relevant regulations must be in scope of the system.
We will be working with the British Chambers of Commerce to ensure that Michael Fallon understand how important Norfolk businesses feel out the need to reduce unnecessary red tape and have invited him to Norfolk next year to feed back what difference he has made.
